initial commit of ebook 2324HEADmain

1 files changed, 4153 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/2324-0.txt b/2324-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ac56302
--- /dev/null
+++ b/2324-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,4153 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook of A House to Let, by Charles Dickens, et al
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: A House to Let
+
+Author: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Adelaide
+Ann Procter
+
+Release Date: September 1, 2000 [eBook #2324]
+[Most recently updated: April 14, 2021]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Transcribed from the 1903 Chapman and Hall edition by
+David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk. Proofed by David, Edgar
+Howard, Dawn Smith, Terry Jeffress and Jane Foster. Updated by Richard
+Tonsing
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HOUSE TO LET ***
+
+
+
+
+A HOUSE TO LET (FULL TEXT)
+by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Adelaide Ann
+Procter
+
+
+Contents:
+
+Over the Way
+The Manchester Marriage
+Going into Society
+Three Evenings in the House
+Trottle’s Report
+Let at Last
+
+
+
+
+OVER THE WAY
+
+
+I had been living at Tunbridge Wells and nowhere else, going on for ten
+years, when my medical man—very clever in his profession, and the
+prettiest player I ever saw in my life of a hand at Long Whist, which was
+a noble and a princely game before Short was heard of—said to me, one
+day, as he sat feeling my pulse on the actual sofa which my poor dear
+sister Jane worked before her spine came on, and laid her on a board for
+fifteen months at a stretch—the most upright woman that ever lived—said
+to me, “What we want, ma’am, is a fillip.”
+
+“Good gracious, goodness gracious, Doctor Towers!” says I, quite startled
+at the man, for he was so christened himself: “don’t talk as if you were
+alluding to people’s names; but say what you mean.”
+
+“I mean, my dear ma’am, that we want a little change of air and scene.”
+
+“Bless the man!” said I; “does he mean we or me!”
+
+“I mean you, ma’am.”
+
+“Then Lard forgive you, Doctor Towers,” I said; “why don’t you get into a
+habit of expressing yourself in a straightforward manner, like a loyal
+subject of our gracious Queen Victoria, and a member of the Church of
+England?”
+
+Towers laughed, as he generally does when he has fidgetted me into any of
+my impatient ways—one of my states, as I call them—and then he began,—
+
+“Tone, ma’am, Tone, is all you require!”  He appealed to Trottle, who
+just then came in with the coal-scuttle, looking, in his nice black suit,
+like an amiable man putting on coals from motives of benevolence.
+
+Trottle (whom I always call my right hand) has been in my service
+two-and-thirty years. He entered my service, far away from England.
+He is the best of creatures, and the most respectable of men; but,
+opinionated.
+
+“What you want, ma’am,” says Trottle, making up the fire in his quiet and
+skilful way, “is Tone.”
+
+“Lard forgive you both!” says I, bursting out a-laughing; “I see you are
+in a conspiracy against me, so I suppose you must do what you like with
+me, and take me to London for a change.”
+
+For some weeks Towers had hinted at London, and consequently I was
+prepared for him.  When we had got to this point, we got on so
+expeditiously, that Trottle was packed off to London next day but one, to
+find some sort of place for me to lay my troublesome old head in.
+
+Trottle came back to me at the Wells after two days’ absence, with
+accounts of a charming place that could be taken for six months certain,
+with liberty to renew on the same terms for another six, and which really
+did afford every accommodation that I wanted.
+
+“Could you really find no fault at all in the rooms, Trottle?” I asked
+him.
+
+“Not a single one, ma’am.  They are exactly suitable to you.  There is
+not a fault in them.  There is but one fault outside of them.”
+
+“And what’s that?”
+
+“They are opposite a House to Let.”
+
+“O!” I said, considering of it.  “But is that such a very great
+objection?”
+
+“I think it my duty to mention it, ma’am.  It is a dull object to look
+at.  Otherwise, I was so greatly pleased with the lodging that I should
+have closed with the terms at once, as I had your authority to do.”
+
+Trottle thinking so highly of the place, in my interest, I wished not to
+disappoint him.  Consequently I said:
+
+“The empty House may let, perhaps.”
+
+“O, dear no, ma’am,” said Trottle, shaking his head with decision; “it
+won’t let.  It never does let, ma’am.”
+
+“Mercy me!  Why not?”
+
+“Nobody knows, ma’am.  All I have to mention is, ma’am, that the House
+won’t let!”
+
+“How long has this unfortunate House been to let, in the name of
+Fortune?” said I.
+
+“Ever so long,” said Trottle.   “Years.”
+
+“Is it in ruins?”
+
+“It’s a good deal out of repair, ma’am, but it’s not in ruins.”
+
+The long and the short of this business was, that next day I had a pair
+of post-horses put to my chariot—for, I never travel by railway: not
+that I have anything to say against railways, except that they came in
+when I was too old to take to them; and that they made ducks and drakes
+of a few turnpike-bonds I had—and so I went up myself, with Trottle in
+the rumble, to look at the inside of this same lodging, and at the
+outside of this same House.
+
+As I say, I went and saw for myself.  The lodging was perfect.  That, I
+was sure it would be; because Trottle is the best judge of comfort I
+know.  The empty house was an eyesore; and that I was sure it would be
+too, for the same reason.  However, setting the one thing against the
+other, the good against the bad, the lodging very soon got the victory
+over the House.  My lawyer, Mr. Squares, of Crown Office Row; Temple,
+drew up an agreement; which his young man jabbered over so dreadfully
+when he read it to me, that I didn’t understand one word of it except my
+own name; and hardly that, and I signed it, and the other party signed
+it, and, in three weeks’ time, I moved my old bones, bag and baggage, up
+to London.
+
+For the first month or so, I arranged to leave Trottle at the Wells.  I
+made this arrangement, not only because there was a good deal to take
+care of in the way of my school-children and pensioners, and also of a
+new stove in the hall to air the house in my absence, which appeared to
+me calculated to blow up and burst; but, likewise because I suspect
+Trottle (though the steadiest of men, and a widower between sixty and
+seventy) to be what I call rather a Philanderer.  I mean, that when any
+friend comes down to see me and brings a maid, Trottle is always
+remarkably ready to show that maid the Wells of an evening; and that I
+have more than once noticed the shadow of his arm, outside the room door
+nearly opposite my chair, encircling that maid’s waist on the landing,
+like a table-cloth brush.
+
+Therefore, I thought it just as well, before any London Philandering took
+place, that I should have a little time to look round me, and to see what
+girls were in and about the place.  So, nobody stayed with me in my new
+lodging at first after Trottle had established me there safe and sound,
+but Peggy Flobbins, my maid; a most affectionate and attached woman, who
+never was an object of Philandering since I have known her, and is not
+likely to begin to become so after nine-and-twenty years next March.
+
+It was the fifth of November when I first breakfasted in my new rooms.
+The Guys were going about in the brown fog, like magnified monsters of
+insects in table-beer, and there was a Guy resting on the door-steps of
+the House to Let.  I put on my glasses, partly to see how the boys were
+pleased with what I sent them out by Peggy, and partly to make sure that
+she didn’t approach too near the ridiculous object, which of course was
+full of sky-rockets, and might go off into bangs at any moment.  In this
+way it happened that the first time I ever looked at the House to Let,
+after I became its opposite neighbour, I had my glasses on.  And this
+might not have happened once in fifty times, for my sight is uncommonly
+good for my time of life; and I wear glasses as little as I can, for fear
+of spoiling it.
+
+I knew already that it was a ten-roomed house, very dirty, and much
+dilapidated; that the area-rails were rusty and peeling away, and that
+two or three of them were wanting, or half-wanting; that there were
+broken panes of glass in the windows, and blotches of mud on other panes,
+which the boys had thrown at them; that there was quite a collection of
+stones in the area, also proceeding from those Young Mischiefs; that
+there were games chalked on the pavement before the house, and likenesses
+of ghosts chalked on the street-door; that the windows were all darkened
+by rotting old blinds, or shutters, or both; that the bills “To Let,” had
+curled up, as if the damp air of the place had given them cramps; or had
+dropped down into corners, as if they were no more.  I had seen all this
+on my first visit, and I had remarked to Trottle, that the lower part of
+the black board about terms was split away; that the rest had become
+illegible, and that the very stone of the door-steps was broken across.
+Notwithstanding, I sat at my breakfast table on that Please to Remember
+the fifth of November morning, staring at the House through my glasses,
+as if I had never looked at it before.
+
+All at once—in the first-floor window on my right—down in a low corner,
+at a hole in a blind or a shutter—I found that I was looking at a secret
+Eye.  The reflection of my fire may have touched it and made it shine;
+but, I saw it shine and vanish.
+
+The eye might have seen me, or it might not have seen me, sitting there
+in the glow of my fire—you can take which probability you prefer,
+without offence—but something struck through my frame, as if the sparkle
+of this eye had been electric, and had flashed straight at me.  It had
+such an effect upon me, that I could not remain by myself, and I rang for
+Flobbins, and invented some little jobs for her, to keep her in the room.
+After my breakfast was cleared away, I sat in the same place with my
+glasses on, moving my head, now so, and now so, trying whether, with the
+shining of my fire and the flaws in the window-glass, I could reproduce
+any sparkle seeming to be up there, that was like the sparkle of an eye.
+But no; I could make nothing like it.  I could make ripples and crooked
+lines in the front of the House to Let, and I could even twist one window
+up and loop it into another; but, I could make no eye, nor anything like
+an eye.  So I convinced myself that I really had seen an eye.
+
+Well, to be sure I could not get rid of the impression of this eye, and
+it troubled me and troubled me, until it was almost a torment.  I don’t
+think I was previously inclined to concern my head much about the
+opposite House; but, after this eye, my head was full of the house; and I
+thought of little else than the house, and I watched the house, and I
+talked about the house, and I dreamed of the house.  In all this, I fully
+believe now, there was a good Providence.  But, you will judge for
+yourself about that, bye-and-bye.
+
+My landlord was a butler, who had married a cook, and set up
+housekeeping.  They had not kept house longer than a couple of years, and
+they knew no more about the House to Let than I did.  Neither could I
+find out anything concerning it among the trades-people or otherwise;
+further than what Trottle had told me at first.  It had been empty, some
+said six years, some said eight, some said ten.  It never did let, they
+all agreed, and it never would let.
+
+I soon felt convinced that I should work myself into one of my states
+about the House; and I soon did.  I lived for a whole month in a flurry,
+that was always getting worse.  Towers’s prescriptions, which I had
+brought to London with me, were of no more use than nothing.  In the cold
+winter sunlight, in the thick winter fog, in the black winter rain, in
+the white winter snow, the House was equally on my mind.  I have heard,
+as everybody else has, of a spirit’s haunting a house; but I have had my
+own personal experience of a house’s haunting a spirit; for that House
+haunted mine.
+
+In all that month’s time, I never saw anyone go into the House nor come
+out of the House.  I supposed that such a thing must take place
+sometimes, in the dead of the night, or the glimmer of the morning; but,
+I never saw it done.  I got no relief from having my curtains drawn when
+it came on dark, and shutting out the House.  The Eye then began to shine
+in my fire.
+
+I am a single old woman.  I should say at once, without being at all
+afraid of the name, I am an old maid; only that I am older than the
+phrase would express.  The time was when I had my love-trouble, but, it
+is long and long ago.  He was killed at sea (Dear Heaven rest his blessed
+head!) when I was twenty-five.  I have all my life, since ever I can
+remember, been deeply fond of children.  I have always felt such a love
+for them, that I have had my sorrowful and sinful times when I have
+fancied something must have gone wrong in my life—something must have
+been turned aside from its original intention I mean—or I should have
+been the proud and happy mother of many children, and a fond old
+grandmother this day.  I have soon known better in the cheerfulness and
+contentment that God has blessed me with and given me abundant reason
+for; and yet I have had to dry my eyes even then, when I have thought of
+my dear, brave, hopeful, handsome, bright-eyed Charley, and the trust
+meant to cheer me with.  Charley was my youngest brother, and he went to
+India.  He married there, and sent his gentle little wife home to me to
+be confined, and she was to go back to him, and the baby was to be left
+with me, and I was to bring it up.  It never belonged to this life.  It
+took its silent place among the other incidents in my story that might
+have been, but never were.  I had hardly time to whisper to her “Dead my
+own!” or she to answer, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust! O lay it on my
+breast and comfort Charley!” when she had gone to seek her baby at Our
+Saviour’s feet.  I went to Charley, and I told him there was nothing left
+but me, poor me; and I lived with Charley, out there, several years.  He
+was a man of fifty, when he fell asleep in my arms.  His face had changed
+to be almost old and a little stern; but, it softened, and softened when
+I laid it down that I might cry and pray beside it; and, when I looked at
+it for the last time, it was my dear, untroubled, handsome, youthful
+Charley of long ago.
+
+—I was going on to tell that the loneliness of the House to Let brought
+back all these recollections, and that they had quite pierced my heart
+one evening, when Flobbins, opening the door, and looking very much as if
+she wanted to laugh but thought better of it, said:
+
+“Mr. Jabez Jarber, ma’am!”
+
+Upon which Mr. Jarber ambled in, in his usual absurd way, saying:
+
+“Sophonisba!”
+
+Which I am obliged to confess is my name.  A pretty one and proper one
+enough when it was given to me: but, a good many years out of date now,
+and always sounding particularly high-flown and comical from his lips.  So
+I said, sharply:
+
+“Though it is Sophonisba, Jarber, you are not obliged to mention it, that
+_I_ see.”
+
+In reply to this observation, the ridiculous man put the tips of my five
+right-hand fingers to his lips, and said again, with an aggravating
+accent on the third syllable:
+
+“Sophon_is_ba!”
+
+I don’t burn lamps, because I can’t abide the smell of oil, and wax
+candles belonged to my day.  I hope the convenient situation of one of my
+tall old candlesticks on the table at my elbow will be my excuse for
+saying, that if he did that again, I would chop his toes with it. (I am
+sorry to add that when I told him so, I knew his toes to be tender.)  But,
+really, at my time of life and at Jarber’s, it is too much of a good
+thing.  There is an orchestra still standing in the open air at the
+Wells, before which, in the presence of a throng of fine company, I have
+walked a minuet with Jarber.  But, there is a house still standing, in
+which I have worn a pinafore, and had a tooth drawn by fastening a thread
+to the tooth and the door-handle, and toddling away from the door.  And
+how should I look now, at my years, in a pinafore, or having a door for
+my dentist?
+
+Besides, Jarber always was more or less an absurd man.  He was sweetly
+dressed, and beautifully perfumed, and many girls of my day would have
+given their ears for him; though I am bound to add that he never cared a
+fig for them, or their advances either, and that he was very constant to
+me.  For, he not only proposed to me before my love-happiness ended in
+sorrow, but afterwards too: not once, nor yet twice: nor will we say how
+many times.  However many they were, or however few they were, the last
+time he paid me that compliment was immediately after he had presented me
+with a digestive dinner-pill stuck on the point of a pin.  And I said on
+that occasion, laughing heartily, “Now, Jarber, if you don’t know that
+two people whose united ages would make about a hundred and fifty, have
+got to be old, I do; and I beg to swallow this nonsense in the form of
+this pill” (which I took on the spot), “and I request to, hear no more of
+it.”
+
+After that, he conducted himself pretty well.  He was always a little
+squeezed man, was Jarber, in little sprigged waistcoats; and he had
+always little legs and a little smile, and a little voice, and little
+round-about ways.  As long as I can remember him he was always going
+little errands for people, and carrying little gossip.  At this present
+time when he called me “Sophonisba!” he had a little old-fashioned
+lodging in that new neighbourhood of mine.  I had not seen him for two or
+three years, but I had heard that he still went out with a little
+perspective-glass and stood on door-steps in Saint James’s Street, to see
+the nobility go to Court; and went in his little cloak and goloshes
+outside Willis’s rooms to see them go to Almack’s; and caught the
+frightfullest colds, and got himself trodden upon by coachmen and
+linkmen, until he went home to his landlady a mass of bruises, and had to
+be nursed for a month.
+
+Jarber took off his little fur-collared cloak, and sat down opposite me,
+with his little cane and hat in his hand.
+
+“Let us have no more Sophonisbaing, if _you_ please, Jarber,” I said.
+“Call me Sarah.  How do you do?  I hope you are pretty well.”
+
+“Thank you.  And you?” said Jarber.
+
+“I am as well as an old woman can expect to be.”
+
+Jarber was beginning:
+
+“Say, not old, Sophon—” but I looked at the candlestick, and he left
+off; pretending not to have said anything.
+
+“I am infirm, of course,” I said, “and so are you.  Let us both be
+thankful it’s no worse.”
+
+“Is it possible that you look worried?” said Jarber.
+
+“It is very possible.  I have no doubt it is the fact.”
+
+“And what has worried my Soph-, soft-hearted friend,” said Jarber.
+
+“Something not easy, I suppose, to comprehend.  I am worried to death by
+a House to Let, over the way.”
+
+Jarber went with his little tip-toe step to the window-curtains, peeped
+out, and looked round at me.
+
+“Yes,” said I, in answer: “that house.”
+
+After peeping out again, Jarber came back to his chair with a tender air,
+and asked: “How does it worry you, S-arah?”
+
+“It is a mystery to me,” said I.  “Of course every house _is_ a mystery,
+more or less; but, something that I don’t care to mention” (for truly the
+Eye was so slight a thing to mention that I was more than half ashamed of
+it), “has made that House so mysterious to me, and has so fixed it in my
+mind, that I have had no peace for a month.  I foresee that I shall have
+no peace, either, until Trottle comes to me, next Monday.”
+
+I might have mentioned before, that there is a lone-standing jealousy
+between Trottle and Jarber; and that there is never any love lost between
+those two.
+
+“_Trottle_,” petulantly repeated Jarber, with a little flourish of his
+cane; “how is _Trottle_ to restore the lost peace of Sarah?”
+
+“He will exert himself to find out something about the House.  I have
+fallen into that state about it, that I really must discover by some
+means or other, good or bad, fair or foul, how and why it is that that
+House remains To Let.”
+
+“And why Trottle?  Why not,” putting his little hat to his heart; “why
+not, Jarber?”
+
+“To tell you the truth, I have never thought of Jarber in the matter.  And
+now I do think of Jarber, through your having the kindness to suggest
+him—for which I am really and truly obliged to you—I don’t think he
+could do it.”
+
+“Sarah!”
+
+“I think it would be too much for you, Jarber.”
+
+“Sarah!”
+
+“There would be coming and going, and fetching and carrying, Jarber, and
+you might catch cold.”
+
+“Sarah!  What can be done by Trottle, can be done by me.  I am on terms
+of acquaintance with every person of responsibility in this parish.  I am
+intimate at the Circulating Library.  I converse daily with the Assessed
+Taxes.  I lodge with the Water Rate.  I know the Medical Man.  I lounge
+habitually at the House Agent’s.  I dine with the Churchwardens.  I move
+to the Guardians.  Trottle!  A person in the sphere of a domestic, and
+totally unknown to society!”
+
+“Don’t be warm, Jarber.  In mentioning Trottle, I have naturally relied
+on my Right-Hand, who would take any trouble to gratify even a whim of
+his old mistress’s.  But, if you can find out anything to help to unravel
+the mystery of this House to Let, I shall be fully as much obliged to you
+as if there was never a Trottle in the land.”
+
+Jarber rose and put on his little cloak.  A couple of fierce brass lions
+held it tight round his little throat; but a couple of the mildest Hares
+might have done that, I am sure.  “Sarah,” he said, “I go.  Expect me on
+Monday evening, the Sixth, when perhaps you will give me a cup of
+tea;—may I ask for no Green?  Adieu!”
+
+This was on a Thursday, the second of December.  When I reflected that
+Trottle would come back on Monday, too, I had my misgivings as to the
+difficulty of keeping the two powers from open warfare, and indeed I was
+more uneasy than I quite like to confess.  However, the empty House
+swallowed up that thought next morning, as it swallowed up most other
+thoughts now, and the House quite preyed upon me all that day, and all
+the Saturday.
+
+It was a very wet Sunday: raining and blowing from morning to night.  When
+the bells rang for afternoon church, they seemed to ring in the commotion
+of the puddles as well as in the wind, and they sounded very loud and
+dismal indeed, and the street looked very dismal indeed, and the House
+looked dismallest of all.
+
+I was reading my prayers near the light, and my fire was growing in the
+darkening window-glass, when, looking up, as I prayed for the fatherless
+children and widows and all who were desolate and oppressed,—I saw the
+Eye again.  It passed in a moment, as it had done before; but, this time,
+I was inwardly more convinced that I had seen it.
+
+Well to be sure, I _had_ a night that night!  Whenever I closed my own
+eyes, it was to see eyes.  Next morning, at an unreasonably, and I should
+have said (but for that railroad) an impossibly early hour, comes
+Trottle.  As soon as he had told me all about the Wells, I told him all
+about the House.  He listened with as great interest and attention as I
+could possibly wish, until I came to Jabez Jarber, when he cooled in an
+instant, and became opinionated.
+
+“Now, Trottle,” I said, pretending not to notice, “when Mr. Jarber comes
+back this evening, we must all lay our heads together.”
+
+“I should hardly think that would be wanted, ma’am; Mr. Jarber’s head is
+surely equal to anything.”
+
+Being determined not to notice, I said again, that we must all lay our
+heads together.
+
+“Whatever you order, ma’am, shall be obeyed.  Still, it cannot be
+doubted, I should think, that Mr. Jarber’s head is equal, if not
+superior, to any pressure that can be brought to bear upon it.”
+
+This was provoking; and his way, when he came in and out all through the
+day, of pretending not to see the House to Let, was more provoking still.
+However, being quite resolved not to notice, I gave no sign whatever that
+I did notice.  But, when evening came, and he showed in Jarber, and, when
+Jarber wouldn’t be helped off with his cloak, and poked his cane into
+cane chair-backs and china ornaments and his own eye, in trying to
+unclasp his brazen lions of himself (which he couldn’t do, after all), I
+could have shaken them both.
+
+As it was, I only shook the tea-pot, and made the tea.  Jarber had
+brought from under his cloak, a roll of paper, with which he had
+triumphantly pointed over the way, like the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father
+appearing to the late Mr. Kemble, and which he had laid on the table.
+
+“A discovery?” said I, pointing to it, when he was seated, and had got
+his tea-cup.—“Don’t go, Trottle.”
+
+“The first of a series of discoveries,” answered Jarber.  “Account of a
+former tenant, compiled from the Water Rate, and Medical Man.”
+
+“Don’t go, Trottle,” I repeated.  For, I saw him making imperceptibly to
+the door.
+
+“Begging your pardon, ma’am, I might be in Mr. Jarber’s way?”
+
+Jarber looked that he decidedly thought he might be.  I relieved myself
+with a good angry croak, and said—always determined not to notice:
+
+“Have the goodness to sit down, if you please, Trottle.  I wish you to
+hear this.”
+
+Trottle bowed in the stiffest manner, and took the remotest chair he
+could find.  Even that, he moved close to the draught from the keyhole of
+the door.
+
+“Firstly,” Jarber began, after sipping his tea, “would my Sophon—”
+
+“Begin again, Jarber,” said I.
+
+“Would you be much surprised, if this House to Let should turn out to be
+the property of a relation of your own?”
+
+“I should indeed be very much surprised.”
+
+“Then it belongs to your first cousin (I learn, by the way, that he is
+ill at this time) George Forley.”
+
+“Then that is a bad beginning.  I cannot deny that George Forley stands
+in the relation of first cousin to me; but I hold no communication with
+him.  George Forley has been a hard, bitter, stony father to a child now
+dead.  George Forley was most implacable and unrelenting to one of his
+two daughters who made a poor marriage.  George Forley brought all the
+weight of his band to bear as heavily against that crushed thing, as he
+brought it to bear lightly, favouringly, and advantageously upon her
+sister, who made a rich marriage.  I hope that, with the measure George
+Forley meted, it may not be measured out to him again.  I will give
+George Forley no worse wish.”
+
+I was strong upon the subject, and I could not keep the tears out of my
+eyes; for, that young girl’s was a cruel story, and I had dropped many a
+tear over it before.
+
+“The house being George Forley’s,” said I, “is almost enough to account
+for there being a Fate upon it, if Fate there is.  Is there anything
+about George Forley in those sheets of paper?”
+
+“Not a word.”
+
+“I am glad to hear it.  Please to read on.  Trottle, why don’t you come
+nearer?  Why do you sit mortifying yourself in those arctic regions?  Come
+nearer.”
+
+“Thank you, ma’am; I am quite near enough to Mr. Jarber.”
+
+Jarber rounded his chair, to get his back full to my opinionated friend
+and servant, and, beginning to read, tossed the words at him over his
+(Jabez Jarber’s) own ear and shoulder.
+
+He read what follows:
+
+
+
+
+THE MANCHESTER MARRIAGE
+
+
+Mr. and Mrs. Openshaw came from Manchester to London and took the House
+To Let.  He had been, what is called in Lancashire, a Salesman for a
+large manufacturing firm, who were extending their business, and opening
+a warehouse in London; where Mr. Openshaw was now to superintend the
+business.  He rather enjoyed the change of residence; having a kind of
+curiosity about London, which he had never yet been able to gratify in
+his brief visits to the metropolis.  At the same time he had an odd,
+shrewd, contempt for the inhabitants; whom he had always pictured to
+himself as fine, lazy people; caring nothing but for fashion and
+aristocracy, and lounging away their days in Bond Street, and such
+places; ruining good English, and ready in their turn to despise him as a
+provincial.  The hours that the men of business kept in the city
+scandalised him too; accustomed as he was to the early dinners of
+Manchester folk, and the consequently far longer evenings.  Still, he was
+pleased to go to London; though he would not for the world have confessed
+it, even to himself, and always spoke of the step to his friends as one
+demanded of him by the interests of his employers, and sweetened to him
+by a considerable increase of salary.  His salary indeed was so liberal
+that he might have been justified in taking a much larger House than this
+one, had he not thought himself bound to set an example to Londoners of
+how little a Manchester man of business cared for show.  Inside, however,
+he furnished the House with an unusual degree of comfort, and, in the
+winter time, he insisted on keeping up as large fires as the grates would
+allow, in every room where the temperature was in the least chilly.
+Moreover, his northern sense of hospitality was such, that, if he were at
+home, he could hardly suffer a visitor to leave the house without forcing
+meat and drink upon him.  Every servant in the house was well warmed,
+well fed, and kindly treated; for their master scorned all petty saving
+in aught that conduced to comfort; while he amused himself by following
+out all his accustomed habits and individual ways in defiance of what any
+of his new neighbours might think.
+
+His wife was a pretty, gentle woman, of suitable age and character.  He
+was forty-two, she thirty-five.  He was loud and decided; she soft and
+yielding.  They had two children or rather, I should say, she had two;
+for the elder, a girl of eleven, was Mrs. Openshaw’s child by Frank
+Wilson her first husband.  The younger was a little boy, Edwin, who could
+just prattle, and to whom his father delighted to speak in the broadest
+and most unintelligible Lancashire dialect, in order to keep up what he
+called the true Saxon accent.
+
+Mrs. Openshaw’s Christian-name was Alice, and her first husband had been
+her own cousin.  She was the orphan niece of a sea-captain in Liverpool:
+a quiet, grave little creature, of great personal attraction when she was
+fifteen or sixteen, with regular features and a blooming complexion.  But
+she was very shy, and believed herself to be very stupid and awkward; and
+was frequently scolded by her aunt, her own uncle’s second wife.  So when
+her cousin, Frank Wilson, came home from a long absence at sea, and first
+was kind and protective to her; secondly, attentive and thirdly,
+desperately in love with her, she hardly knew how to be grateful enough
+to him.  It is true she would have preferred his remaining in the first
+or second stages of behaviour; for his violent love puzzled and
+frightened her.  Her uncle neither helped nor hindered the love affair
+though it was going on under his own eyes.  Frank’s step-mother had such
+a variable temper, that there was no knowing whether what she liked one
+day she would like the next, or not.  At length she went to such extremes
+of crossness, that Alice was only too glad to shut her eyes and rush
+blindly at the chance of escape from domestic tyranny offered her by a
+marriage with her cousin; and, liking him better than any one in the
+world except her uncle (who was at this time at sea) she went off one
+morning and was married to him; her only bridesmaid being the housemaid
+at her aunt’s.  The consequence was, that Frank and his wife went into
+lodgings, and Mrs. Wilson refused to see them, and turned away Norah, the
+warm-hearted housemaid; whom they accordingly took into their service.
+When Captain Wilson returned from his voyage, he was very cordial with
+the young couple, and spent many an evening at their lodgings; smoking
+his pipe, and sipping his grog; but he told them that, for quietness’
+sake, he could not ask them to his own house; for his wife was bitter
+against them.  They were not very unhappy about this.
+
+The seed of future unhappiness lay rather in Frank’s vehement, passionate
+disposition; which led him to resent his wife’s shyness and want of
+demonstration as failures in conjugal duty.  He was already tormenting
+himself, and her too, in a slighter degree, by apprehensions and
+imaginations of what might befall her during his approaching absence at
+sea.  At last he went to his father and urged him to insist upon Alice’s
+being once more received under his roof; the more especially as there was
+now a prospect of her confinement while her husband was away on his
+voyage.  Captain Wilson was, as he himself expressed it, “breaking up,”
+and unwilling to undergo the excitement of a scene; yet he felt that what
+his son said was true.  So he went to his wife.  And before Frank went to
+sea, he had the comfort of seeing his wife installed in her old little
+garret in his father’s house.  To have placed her in the one best spare
+room was a step beyond Mrs. Wilson’s powers of submission or generosity.
+The worst part about it, however, was that the faithful Norah had to be
+dismissed.  Her place as housemaid had been filled up; and, even had it
+not, she had forfeited Mrs. Wilson’s good opinion for ever.  She
+comforted her young master and mistress by pleasant prophecies of the
+time when they would have a household of their own; of which, in whatever
+service she might be in the meantime, she should be sure to form part.
+Almost the last action Frank Wilson did, before setting sail, was going
+with Alice to see Norah once more at her mother’s house.  And then he
+went away.
+
+Alice’s father-in-law grew more and more feeble as winter advanced.  She
+was of great use to her step-mother in nursing and amusing him; and,
+although there was anxiety enough in the household, there was perhaps
+more of peace than there had been for years; for Mrs. Wilson had not a
+bad heart, and was softened by the visible approach of death to one whom
+she loved, and touched by the lonely condition of the young creature,
+expecting her first confinement in her husband’s absence.  To this
+relenting mood Norah owed the permission to come and nurse Alice when her
+baby was born, and to remain to attend on Captain Wilson.
+
+Before one letter had been received from Frank (who had sailed for the
+East Indies and China), his father died.  Alice was always glad to
+remember that he had held her baby in his arms, and kissed and blessed it
+before his death.  After that, and the consequent examination into the
+state of his affairs, it was found that he had left far less property
+than people had been led by his style of living to imagine; and, what
+money there was, was all settled upon his wife, and at her disposal after
+her death.  This did not signify much to Alice, as Frank was now first
+mate of his ship, and, in another voyage or two, would be captain.
+Meanwhile he had left her some hundreds (all his savings) in the bank.
+
+It became time for Alice to hear from her husband.  One letter from the
+Cape she had already received.  The next was to announce his arrival in
+India.  As week after week passed over, and no intelligence of the ship’s
+arrival reached the office of the owners, and the Captain’s wife was in
+the same state of ignorant suspense as Alice herself, her fears grew most
+oppressive.  At length the day came when, in reply to her inquiry at the
+Shipping Office, they told her that the owners had given up Hope of ever
+hearing more of the Betsy-Jane, and had sent in their claim upon the
+underwriters.  Now that he was gone for ever, she first felt a yearning,
+longing love for the kind cousin, the dear friend, the sympathising
+protector, whom she should never see again,—first felt a passionate
+desire to show him his child, whom she had hitherto rather craved to have
+all to herself—her own sole possession.  Her grief was, however,
+noiseless, and quiet—rather to the scandal of Mrs. Wilson; who bewailed
+her step-son as if he and she had always lived together in perfect
+harmony, and who evidently thought it her duty to burst into fresh tears
+at every strange face she saw; dwelling on his poor young widow’s
+desolate state, and the helplessness of the fatherless child, with an
+unction, as if she liked the excitement of the sorrowful story.
+
+So passed away the first days of Alice’s widowhood.  Bye-and-bye things
+subsided into their natural and tranquil course.  But, as if this young
+creature was always to be in some heavy trouble, her ewe-lamb began to be
+ailing, pining and sickly.  The child’s mysterious illness turned out to
+be some affection of the spine likely to affect health; but not to
+shorten life—at least so the doctors said.  But the long dreary
+suffering of one whom a mother loves as Alice loved her only child, is
+hard to look forward to.  Only Norah guessed what Alice suffered; no one
+but God knew.
+
+And so it fell out, that when Mrs. Wilson, the elder, came to her one day
+in violent distress, occasioned by a very material diminution in the
+value the property that her husband had left her,—a diminution which
+made her income barely enough to support herself, much less Alice—the
+latter could hardly understand how anything which did not touch health or
+life could cause such grief; and she received the intelligence with
+irritating composure.  But when, that afternoon, the little sick child
+was brought in, and the grandmother—who after all loved it well—began a
+fresh moan over her losses to its unconscious ears—saying how she had
+planned to consult this or that doctor, and to give it this or that
+comfort or luxury in after yearn but that now all chance of this had
+passed away—Alice’s heart was touched, and she drew near to Mrs. Wilson
+with unwonted caresses, and, in a spirit not unlike to that of Ruth,
+entreated, that come what would, they might remain together.  After much
+discussion in succeeding days, it was arranged that Mrs. Wilson should
+take a house in Manchester, furnishing it partly with what furniture she
+had, and providing the rest with Alice’s remaining two hundred pounds.
+Mrs. Wilson was herself a Manchester woman, and naturally longed to
+return to her native town.  Some connections of her own at that time
+required lodgings, for which they were willing to pay pretty handsomely.
+Alice undertook the active superintendence and superior work of the
+household.  Norah, willing faithful Norah, offered to cook, scour, do
+anything in short, so that, she might but remain with them.
+
+The plan succeeded.  For some years their first lodgers remained with
+them, and all went smoothly,—with the one sad exception of the little
+girl’s increasing deformity.  How that mother loved that child, is not
+for words to tell!
+
+Then came a break of misfortune.  Their lodgers left, and no one
+succeeded to them.  After some months they had to remove to a smaller
+house; and Alice’s tender conscience was torn by the idea that she ought
+not to be a burden to her mother-in-law, but ought to go out and seek her
+own maintenance.  And leave her child!  The thought came like the
+sweeping boom of a funeral bell over her heart.
+
+Bye-and-bye, Mr. Openshaw came to lodge with them. He had started in
+life as the errand-boy and sweeper-out of a warehouse; had struggled
+up through all the grades of employment in the place, fighting his way
+through the hard striving Manchester life with strong pushing energy
+of character. Every spare moment of time had been sternly given up to
+self-teaching. He was a capital accountant, a good French and German
+scholar, a keen, far-seeing tradesman; understanding markets, and the
+bearing of events, both near and distant, on trade: and yet, with such
+vivid attention to present details, that I do not think he ever saw a
+group of flowers in the fields without thinking whether their colours
+would, or would not, form harmonious contrasts in the coming spring
+muslins and prints. He went to debating societies, and threw himself
+with all his heart and soul into politics; esteeming, it must be owned,
+every man a fool or a knave who differed from him, and overthrowing his
+opponents rather by the loud strength of his language than the calm
+strength if his logic. There was something of the Yankee in all this.
+Indeed his theory ran parallel to the famous Yankee motto—“England
+flogs creation, and Manchester flogs England.” Such a man, as may be
+fancied, had had no time for falling in love, or any such nonsense. At
+the age when most young men go through their courting and matrimony, he
+had not the means of keeping a wife, and was far too practical to think
+of having one. And now that he was in easy circumstances, a rising man,
+he considered women almost as incumbrances to the world, with whom a
+man had better have as little to do as possible. His first impression
+of Alice was indistinct, and he did not care enough about her to make
+it distinct. “A pretty yea-nay kind of woman,” would have been his
+description of her, if he had been pushed into a corner. He was rather
+afraid, in the beginning, that her quiet ways arose from a listlessness
+and laziness of character which would have been exceedingly discordant
+to his active energetic nature. But, when he found out the punctuality
+with which his wishes were attended to, and her work was done; when
+he was called in the morning at the very stroke of the clock, his
+shaving-water scalding hot, his fire bright, his coffee made exactly
+as his peculiar fancy dictated, (for he was a man who had his theory
+about everything, based upon what he knew of science, and often
+perfectly original)—then he began to think: not that Alice had any
+peculiar merit; but that he had got into remarkably good lodgings: his
+restlessness wore away, and he began to consider himself as almost
+settled for life in them.
+
+Mr. Openshaw had been too busy, all his life, to be introspective.  He
+did not know that he had any tenderness in his nature; and if he had
+become conscious of its abstract existence, he would have considered it
+as a manifestation of disease in some part of his nature.  But he was
+decoyed into pity unawares; and pity led on to tenderness.  That little
+helpless child—always carried about by one of the three busy women of
+the house, or else patiently threading coloured beads in the chair from
+which, by no effort of its own, could it ever move; the great grave blue
+eyes, full of serious, not uncheerful, expression, giving to the small
+delicate face a look beyond its years; the soft plaintive voice dropping
+out but few words, so unlike the continual prattle of a child—caught Mr.
+Openshaw’s attention in spite of himself.  One day—he half scorned
+himself for doing so—he cut short his dinner-hour to go in search of
+some toy which should take the place of those eternal beads.  I forget
+what he bought; but, when he gave the present (which he took care to do
+in a short abrupt manner, and when no one was by to see him) he was
+almost thrilled by the flash of delight that came over that child’s face,
+and could not help all through that afternoon going over and over again
+the picture left on his memory, by the bright effect of unexpected joy on
+the little girl’s face.  When he returned home, he found his slippers
+placed by his sitting-room fire; and even more careful attention paid to
+his fancies than was habitual in those model lodgings.  When Alice had
+taken the last of his tea-things away—she had been silent as usual till
+then—she stood for an instant with the door in her hand.  Mr. Openshaw
+looked as if he were deep in his book, though in fact he did not see a
+line; but was heartily wishing the woman would be gone, and not make any
+palaver of gratitude.  But she only said:
+
+“I am very much obliged to you, sir.  Thank you very much,” and was gone,
+even before he could send her away with a “There, my good woman, that’s
+enough!”
+
+For some time longer he took no apparent notice of the child.  He even
+hardened his heart into disregarding her sudden flush of colour, and
+little timid smile of recognition, when he saw her by chance.  But, after
+all, this could not last for ever; and, having a second time given way to
+tenderness, there was no relapse.  The insidious enemy having thus
+entered his heart, in the guise of compassion to the child, soon assumed
+the more dangerous form of interest in the mother.  He was aware of this
+change of feeling, despised himself for it, struggled with it nay,
+internally yielded to it and cherished it, long before he suffered the
+slightest expression of it, by word, action, or look, to escape him.  He
+watched Alice’s docile obedient ways to her stepmother; the love which
+she had inspired in the rough Norah (roughened by the wear and tear of
+sorrow and years); but above all, he saw the wild, deep, passionate
+affection existing between her and her child.  They spoke little to any
+one else, or when any one else was by; but, when alone together, they
+talked, and murmured, and cooed, and chattered so continually, that Mr.
+Openshaw first wondered what they could find to say to each other, and
+next became irritated because they were always so grave and silent with
+him.  All this time, he was perpetually devising small new pleasures for
+the child.  His thoughts ran, in a pertinacious way, upon the desolate
+life before her; and often he came back from his day’s work loaded with
+the very thing Alice had been longing for, but had not been able to
+procure.  One time it was a little chair for drawing the little sufferer
+along the streets, and many an evening that ensuing summer Mr. Openshaw
+drew her along himself, regardless of the remarks of his acquaintances.
+One day in autumn he put down his newspaper, as Alice came in with the
+breakfast, and said, in as indifferent a voice as he could assume:
+
+“Mrs. Frank, is there any reason why we two should not put up our horses
+together?”
+
+Alice stood still in perplexed wonder.  What did he mean?  He had resumed
+the reading of his newspaper, as if he did not expect any answer; so she
+found silence her safest course, and went on quietly arranging his
+breakfast without another word passing between them.  Just as he was
+leaving the house, to go to the warehouse as usual, he turned back and
+put his head into the bright, neat, tidy kitchen, where all the women
+breakfasted in the morning:
+
+“You’ll think of what I said, Mrs. Frank” (this was her name with the
+lodgers), “and let me have your opinion upon it to-night.”
+
+Alice was thankful that her mother and Norah were too busy talking
+together to attend much to this speech.  She determined not to think
+about it at all through the day; and, of course, the effort not to think
+made her think all the more.  At night she sent up Norah with his tea.
+But Mr. Openshaw almost knocked Norah down as she was going out at the
+door, by pushing past her and calling out “Mrs. Frank!” in an impatient
+voice, at the top of the stairs.
+
+Alice went up, rather than seem to have affixed too much meaning to his
+words.
+
+“Well, Mrs. Frank,” he said, “what answer?  Don’t make it too long; for I
+have lots of office-work to get through to-night.”
+
+“I hardly know what you meant, sir,” said truthful Alice.
+
+“Well!  I should have thought you might have guessed.  You’re not new at
+this sort of work, and I am.  However, I’ll make it plain this time.  Will
+you have me to be thy wedded husband, and serve me, and love me, and
+honour me, and all that sort of thing?  Because if you will, I will do as
+much by you, and be a father to your child—and that’s more than is put
+in the prayer-book.  Now, I’m a man of my word; and what I say, I feel;
+and what I promise, I’ll do.  Now, for your answer!”
+
+Alice was silent.  He began to make the tea, as if her reply was a matter
+of perfect indifference to him; but, as soon as that was done, he became
+impatient.
+
+“Well?” said he.
+
+“How long, sir, may I have to think over it?”
+
+“Three minutes!” (looking at his watch).  “You’ve had two already—that
+makes five.  Be a sensible woman, say Yes, and sit down to tea with me,
+and we’ll talk it over together; for, after tea, I shall be busy; say No”
+(he hesitated a moment to try and keep his voice in the same tone), “and
+I shan’t say another word about it, but pay up a year’s rent for my rooms
+to-morrow, and be off.  Time’s up!  Yes or no?”
+
+“If you please, sir,—you have been so good to little Ailsie—”
+
+“There, sit down comfortably by me on the sofa, and let us have our tea
+together. I am glad to find you are as good and sensible as I took you
+for.”
+
+And this was Alice Wilson’s second wooing.
+
+Mr. Openshaw’s will was too strong, and his circumstances too good, for
+him not to carry all before him.  He settled Mrs. Wilson in a comfortable
+house of her own, and made her quite independent of lodgers.  The little
+that Alice said with regard to future plans was in Norah’s behalf.
+
+“No,” said Mr. Openshaw.  “Norah shall take care of the old lady as long
+as she lives; and, after that, she shall either come and live with us,
+or, if she likes it better, she shall have a provision for life—for your
+sake, missus.  No one who has been good to you or the child shall go
+unrewarded.  But even the little one will be better for some fresh stuff
+about her.  Get her a bright, sensible girl as a nurse: one who won’t go
+rubbing her with calf’s-foot jelly as Norah does; wasting good stuff
+outside that ought to go in, but will follow doctors’ directions; which,
+as you must see pretty clearly by this time, Norah won’t; because they
+give the poor little wench pain.  Now, I’m not above being nesh for other
+folks myself.  I can stand a good blow, and never change colour; but, set
+me in the operating-room in the infirmary, and I turn as sick as a girl.
+Yet, if need were, I would hold the little wench on my knees while she
+screeched with pain, if it were to do her poor back good.  Nay, nay,
+wench! keep your white looks for the time when it comes—I don’t say it
+ever will.  But this I know, Norah will spare the child and cheat the
+doctor if she can.  Now, I say, give the bairn a year or two’s chance,
+and then, when the pack of doctors have done their best—and, maybe, the
+old lady has gone—we’ll have Norah back, or do better for her.”
+
+The pack of doctors could do no good to little Ailsie.  She was beyond
+their power.  But her father (for so he insisted on being called, and
+also on Alice’s no longer retaining the appellation of Mama, but becoming
+henceforward Mother), by his healthy cheerfulness of manner, his clear
+decision of purpose, his odd turns and quirks of humour, added to his
+real strong love for the helpless little girl, infused a new element of
+brightness and confidence into her life; and, though her back remained
+the same, her general health was strengthened, and Alice—never going
+beyond a smile herself—had the pleasure of seeing her child taught to
+laugh.
+
+As for Alice’s own life, it was happier than it had ever been.  Mr.
+Openshaw required no demonstration, no expressions of affection from her.
+Indeed, these would rather have disgusted him.  Alice could love deeply,
+but could not talk about it.  The perpetual requirement of loving words,
+looks, and caresses, and misconstruing their absence into absence of
+love, had been the great trial of her former married life.  Now, all went
+on clear and straight, under the guidance of her husband’s strong sense,
+warm heart, and powerful will.  Year by year their worldly prosperity
+increased.  At Mrs. Wilson’s death, Norah came back to them, as nurse to
+the newly-born little Edwin; into which post she was not installed
+without a pretty strong oration on the part of the proud and happy
+father; who declared that if he found out that Norah ever tried to screen
+the boy by a falsehood, or to make him nesh either in body or mind, she
+should go that very day.  Norah and Mr. Openshaw were not on the most
+thoroughly cordial terms; neither of them fully recognising or
+appreciating the other’s best qualities.
+
+This was the previous history of the Lancashire family who had now
+removed to London, and had come to occupy the House.
+
+They had been there about a year, when Mr. Openshaw suddenly informed his
+wife that he had determined to heal long-standing feuds, and had asked
+his uncle and aunt Chadwick to come and pay them a visit and see London.
+Mrs. Openshaw had never seen this uncle and aunt of her husband’s.  Years
+before she had married him, there had been a quarrel.  All she knew was,
+that Mr. Chadwick was a small manufacturer in a country town in South
+Lancashire.  She was extremely pleased that the breach was to be healed,
+and began making preparations to render their visit pleasant.
+
+They arrived at last.  Going to see London was such an event to them,
+that Mrs. Chadwick had made all new linen fresh for the occasion-from
+night-caps downwards; and, as for gowns, ribbons, and collars, she might
+have been going into the wilds of Canada where never a shop is, so large
+was her stock.  A fortnight before the day of her departure for London,
+she had formally called to take leave of all her acquaintance; saying she
+should need all the intermediate time for packing up.  It was like a
+second wedding in her imagination; and, to complete the resemblance which
+an entirely new wardrobe made between the two events, her husband brought
+her back from Manchester, on the last market-day before they set off, a
+gorgeous pearl and amethyst brooch, saying, “Lunnon should see that
+Lancashire folks knew a handsome thing when they saw it.”
+
+For some time after Mr. and Mrs. Chadwick arrived at the Openshaws’,
+there was no opportunity for wearing this brooch; but at length they
+obtained an order to see Buckingham Palace, and the spirit of loyalty
+demanded that Mrs. Chadwick should wear her best clothes in visiting the
+abode of her sovereign.  On her return, she hastily changed her dress;
+for Mr. Openshaw had planned that they should go to Richmond, drink tea
+and return by moonlight.  Accordingly, about five o’clock, Mr. and Mrs.
+Openshaw and Mr. and Mrs. Chadwick set off.
+
+The housemaid and cook sate below, Norah hardly knew where. She was
+always engrossed in the nursery, in tending her two children, and
+in sitting by the restless, excitable Ailsie till she fell asleep.
+Bye-and-bye, the housemaid Bessy tapped gently at the door. Norah went
+to her, and they spoke in whispers.
+
+“Nurse! there’s some one down-stairs wants you.”
+
+“Wants me!  Who is it?”
+
+“A gentleman—”
+
+“A gentleman?  Nonsense!”
+
+“Well! a man, then, and he asks for you, and he rung at the front door
+bell, and has walked into the dining-room.”
+
+“You should never have let him,” exclaimed Norah, “master and missus
+out—”
+
+“I did not want him to come in; but when he heard you lived here, he
+walked past me, and sat down on the first chair, and said, ‘Tell her to
+come and speak to me.’  There is no gas lighted in the room, and supper
+is all set out.”
+
+“He’ll be off with the spoons!” exclaimed Norah, putting the housemaid’s
+fear into words, and preparing to leave the room, first, however, giving
+a look to Ailsie, sleeping soundly and calmly.
+
+Down-stairs she went, uneasy fears stirring in her bosom.  Before she
+entered the dining-room she provided herself with a candle, and, with it
+in her hand, she went in, looking round her in the darkness for her
+visitor.
+
+He was standing up, holding by the table.  Norah and he looked at each
+other; gradual recognition coming into their eyes.
+
+“Norah?” at length he asked.
+
+“Who are you?” asked Norah, with the sharp tones of alarm and
+incredulity.  “I don’t know you:” trying, by futile words of disbelief,
+to do away with the terrible fact before her.
+
+“Am I so changed?” he said, pathetically.  “I daresay I am.  But, Norah,
+tell me!” he breathed hard, “where is my wife?  Is she—is she alive?”
+
+He came nearer to Norah, and would have taken her hand; but she backed
+away from him; looking at him all the time with staring eyes, as if he
+were some horrible object.  Yet he was a handsome, bronzed, good-looking
+fellow, with beard and moustache, giving him a foreign-looking aspect;
+but his eyes! there was no mistaking those eager, beautiful eyes—the
+very same that Norah had watched not half-an-hour ago, till sleep stole
+softly over them.
+
+“Tell me, Norah—I can bear it—I have feared it so often.  Is she dead?”
+Norah still kept silence.   “She is dead!”  He hung on Norah’s words and
+looks, as if for confirmation or contradiction.
+
+“What shall I do?” groaned Norah.  “O, sir! why did you come? how did you
+find me out? where have you been?  We thought you dead, we did, indeed!”
+She poured out words and questions to gain time, as if time would help
+her.
+
+“Norah! answer me this question, straight, by yes or no—Is my wife
+dead?”
+
+“No, she is not!” said Norah, slowly and heavily.
+
+“O what a relief!  Did she receive my letters?  But perhaps you don’t
+know.  Why did you leave her?  Where is she?  O Norah, tell me all
+quickly!”
+
+“Mr. Frank!” said Norah at last, almost driven to bay by her terror lest
+her mistress should return at any moment, and find him there—unable to
+consider what was best to be done or said—rushing at something decisive,
+because she could not endure her present state: “Mr. Frank! we never
+heard a line from you, and the shipowners said you had gone down, you and
+every one else.  We thought you were dead, if ever man was, and poor Miss
+Alice and her little sick, helpless child!  O, sir, you must guess it,”
+cried the poor creature at last, bursting out into a passionate fit of
+crying, “for indeed I cannot tell it.  But it was no one’s fault.  God
+help us all this night!”
+
+Norah had sate down.  She trembled too much to stand.  He took her hands
+in his.  He squeezed them hard, as if by physical pressure, the truth
+could be wrung out.
+
+“Norah!”  This time his tone was calm, stagnant as despair.  “She has
+married again!”
+
+Norah shook her head sadly.  The grasp slowly relaxed.  The man had
+fainted.
+
+There was brandy in the room.  Norah forced some drops into Mr. Frank’s
+mouth, chafed his hands, and—when mere animal life returned, before the
+mind poured in its flood of memories and thoughts—she lifted him up, and
+rested his head against her knees.  Then she put a few crumbs of bread
+taken from the supper-table, soaked in brandy into his mouth.  Suddenly
+he sprang to his feet.
+
+“Where is she?  Tell me this instant.”  He looked so wild, so mad, so
+desperate, that Norah felt herself to be in bodily danger; but her time
+of dread had gone by.  She had been afraid to tell him the truth, and
+then she had been a coward.  Now, her wits were sharpened by the sense of
+his desperate state.  He must leave the house.  She would pity him
+afterwards; but now she must rather command and upbraid; for he must
+leave the house before her mistress came home.  That one necessity stood
+clear before her.
+
+“She is not here; that is enough for you to know.  Nor can I say exactly
+where she is” (which was true to the letter if not to the spirit).  “Go
+away, and tell me where to find you to-morrow, and I will tell you all.
+My master and mistress may come back at any minute, and then what would
+become of me with a strange man in the house?”
+
+Such an argument was too petty to touch his excited mind.
+
+“I don’t care for your master and mistress.  If your master is a man, he
+must feel for me poor shipwrecked sailor that I am—kept for years a
+prisoner amongst savages, always, always, always thinking of my wife and
+my home—dreaming of her by night, talking to her, though she could not
+hear, by day.  I loved her more than all heaven and earth put together.
+Tell me where she is, this instant, you wretched woman, who salved over
+her wickedness to her, as you do to me.”
+
+The clock struck ten. Desperate positions require desperate measures.
+
+“If you will leave the house now, I will come to you to-morrow and tell
+you all. What is more, you shall see your child now. She lies sleeping
+up-stairs. O, sir, you have a child, you do not know that as yet—a
+little weakly girl—with just a heart and soul beyond her years. We have
+reared her up with such care: We watched her, for we thought for many
+a year she might die any day, and we tended her, and no hard thing has
+come near her, and no rough word has ever been said to her. And now
+you, come and will take her life into your hand, and will crush it.
+Strangers to her have been kind to her; but her own father—Mr. Frank, I
+am her nurse, and I love her, and I tend her, and I would do anything
+for her that I could. Her mother’s heart beats as hers beats; and, if
+she suffers a pain, her mother trembles all over. If she is happy, it
+is her mother that smiles and is glad. If she is growing stronger,
+her mother is healthy: if she dwindles, her mother languishes. If she
+dies—well, I don’t know: it is not every one can lie down and die when
+they wish it. Come up-stairs, Mr. Frank, and see your child. Seeing her
+will do good to your poor heart. Then go away, in God’s name, just this
+one night—to-morrow, if need be, you can do anything—kill us all if you
+will, or show yourself—a great grand man, whom God will bless for ever
+and ever. Come, Mr. Frank, the look of a sleeping child is sure to give
+peace.”
+
+She led him up-stairs; at first almost helping his steps, till they came
+near the nursery door.  She had almost forgotten the existence of little
+Edwin.  It struck upon her with affright as the shaded light fell upon
+the other cot; but she skilfully threw that corner of the room into
+darkness, and let the light fall on the sleeping Ailsie.  The child had
+thrown down the coverings, and her deformity, as she lay with her back to
+them, was plainly visible through her slight night-gown.  Her little
+face, deprived of the lustre of her eyes, looked wan and pinched, and had
+a pathetic expression in it, even as she slept.  The poor father looked
+and looked with hungry, wistful eyes, into which the big tears came
+swelling up slowly, and dropped heavily down, as he stood trembling and
+shaking all over.  Norah was angry with herself for growing impatient of
+the length of time that long lingering gaze lasted.  She thought that she
+waited for full half-an-hour before Frank stirred.  And then—instead of
+going away—he sank down on his knees by the bedside, and buried his face
+in the clothes.  Little Ailsie stirred uneasily.  Norah pulled him up in
+terror.  She could afford no more time even for prayer in her extremity
+of fear; for surely the next moment would bring her mistress home.  She
+took him forcibly by the arm; but, as he was going, his eye lighted on
+the other bed: he stopped.  Intelligence came back into his face.  His
+hands clenched.
+
+“His child?” he asked.
+
+“Her child,” replied Norah.  “God watches over him,” said she
+instinctively; for Frank’s looks excited her fears, and she needed to
+remind herself of the Protector of the helpless.
+
+“God has not watched over me,” he said, in despair; his thoughts
+apparently recoiling on his own desolate, deserted state.  But Norah had
+no time for pity.  To-morrow she would be as compassionate as her heart
+prompted.  At length she guided him downstairs and shut the outer door
+and bolted it—as if by bolts to keep out facts.
+
+Then she went back into the dining-room and effaced all traces of his
+presence as far as she could.  She went upstairs to the nursery and sate
+there, her head on her hand, thinking what was to come of all this
+misery.  It seemed to her very long before they did return; yet it was
+hardly eleven o’clock.  She so heard the loud, hearty Lancashire voices
+on the stairs; and, for the first time, she understood the contrast of
+the desolation of the poor man who had so lately gone forth in lonely
+despair.
+
+It almost put her out of patience to see Mrs. Openshaw come in, calmly
+smiling, handsomely dressed, happy, easy, to inquire after her children.
+
+“Did Ailsie go to sleep comfortably?” she whispered to Norah.
+
+“Yes.”
+
+Her mother bent over her, looking at her slumbers with the soft eyes of
+love.  How little she dreamed who had looked on her last!  Then she went
+to Edwin, with perhaps less wistful anxiety in her countenance, but more
+of pride.  She took off her things, to go down to supper.  Norah saw her
+no more that night.
+
+Beside the door into the passage, the sleeping-nursery opened out of Mr.
+and Mrs. Openshaw’s room, in order that they might have the children more
+immediately under their own eyes.  Early the next summer morning Mrs.
+Openshaw was awakened by Ailsie’s startled call of “Mother! mother!”  She
+sprang up, put on her dressing-gown, and went to her child.  Ailsie was
+only half awake, and in a not uncommon state of terror.
+
+“Who was he, mother?  Tell me!”
+
+“Who, my darling?  No one is here.  You have been dreaming love.  Waken
+up quite.  See, it is broad daylight.”
+
+“Yes,” said Ailsie, looking round her; then clinging to her mother, said,
+“but a man was here in the night, mother.”
+
+“Nonsense, little goose.  No man has ever come near you!”
+
+“Yes, he did.  He stood there.  Just by Norah.  A man with hair and a
+beard.  And he knelt down and said his prayers.  Norah knows he was here,
+mother” (half angrily, as Mrs. Openshaw shook her head in smiling
+incredulity).
+
+“Well! we will ask Norah when she comes,” said Mrs. Openshaw, soothingly.
+“But we won’t talk any more about him now.  It is not five o’clock; it is
+too early for you to get up.  Shall I fetch you a book and read to you?”
+
+“Don’t leave me, mother,” said the child, clinging to her.  So Mrs.
+Openshaw sate on the bedside talking to Ailsie, and telling her of what
+they had done at Richmond the evening before, until the little girl’s
+eyes slowly closed and she once more fell asleep.
+
+“What was the matter?” asked Mr. Openshaw, as his wife returned to bed.
+“Ailsie wakened up in a fright, with some story of a man having been in
+the room to say his prayers,—a dream, I suppose.”  And no more was said
+at the time.
+
+Mrs. Openshaw had almost forgotten the whole affair when she got up about
+seven o’clock.  But, bye-and-bye, she heard a sharp altercation going on
+in the nursery.  Norah speaking angrily to Ailsie, a most unusual thing.
+Both Mr. and Mrs. Openshaw listened in astonishment.
+
+“Hold your tongue, Ailsie! let me hear none of your dreams; never let me
+hear you tell that story again!” Ailsie began to cry.
+
+Mr. Openshaw opened the door of communication before his wife could say a
+word.
+
+“Norah, come here!”
+
+The nurse stood at the door, defiant.  She perceived she had been heard,
+but she was desperate.
+
+“Don’t let me hear you speak in that manner to Ailsie again,” he said
+sternly, and shut the door.
+
+Norah was infinitely relieved; for she had dreaded some questioning;
+and a little blame for sharp speaking was what she could well bear, if
+cross-examination was let alone.
+
+Down-stairs they went, Mr. Openshaw carrying Ailsie; the sturdy Edwin
+coming step by step, right foot foremost, always holding his mother’s
+hand.  Each child was placed in a chair by the breakfast-table, and then
+Mr. and Mrs. Openshaw stood together at the window, awaiting their
+visitors’ appearance and making plans for the day.  There was a pause.
+Suddenly Mr. Openshaw turned to Ailsie, and said:
+
+“What a little goosy somebody is with her dreams, waking up poor, tired
+mother in the middle of the night with a story of a man being in the
+room.”
+
+“Father!  I’m sure I saw him,” said Ailsie, half crying.  “I don’t want
+to make Norah angry; but I was not asleep, for all she says I was.  I had
+been asleep,—and I awakened up quite wide awake though I was so
+frightened.  I kept my eyes nearly shut, and I saw the man quite plain.  A
+great brown man with a beard.  He said his prayers.  And then he looked
+at Edwin.  And then Norah took him by the arm and led him away, after
+they had whispered a bit together.”
+
+“Now, my little woman must be reasonable,” said Mr. Openshaw, who was
+always patient with Ailsie.  “There was no man in the house last night at
+all.  No man comes into the house as you know, if you think; much less
+goes up into the nursery.  But sometimes we dream something has happened,
+and the dream is so like reality, that you are not the first person,
+little woman, who has stood out that the thing has really happened.”
+
+“But, indeed it was not a dream!” said Ailsie, beginning to cry.
+
+Just then Mr. and Mrs. Chadwick came down, looking grave and discomposed.
+All during breakfast time they were silent and uncomfortable.  As soon as
+the breakfast things were taken away, and the children had been carried
+up-stairs, Mr. Chadwick began in an evidently preconcerted manner to
+inquire if his nephew was certain that all his servants were honest; for,
+that Mrs. Chadwick had that morning missed a very valuable brooch, which
+she had worn the day before.  She remembered taking it off when she came
+home from Buckingham Palace.  Mr. Openshaw’s face contracted into hard
+lines: grew like what it was before he had known his wife and her child.
+He rang the bell even before his uncle had done speaking.  It was
+answered by the housemaid.
+
+“Mary, was any one here last night while we were away?”
+
+“A man, sir, came to speak to Norah.”
+
+“To speak to Norah!  Who was he?  How long did he stay?”
+
+“I’m sure I can’t tell, sir.  He came—perhaps about nine.  I went up to
+tell Norah in the nursery, and she came down to speak to him.  She let
+him out, sir.  She will know who he was, and how long he stayed.”
+
+She waited a moment to be asked any more questions, but she was not, so
+she went away.
+
+A minute afterwards Openshaw made as though he were going out of the
+room; but his wife laid her hand on his arm:
+
+“Do not speak to her before the children,” she said, in her low, quiet
+voice.  “I will go up and question her.”
+
+“No!  I must speak to her.  You must know,” said he, turning to his uncle
+and aunt, “my missus has an old servant, as faithful as ever woman was, I
+do believe, as far as love goes,—but, at the same time, who does not
+always speak truth, as even the missus must allow.  Now, my notion is,
+that this Norah of ours has been come over by some good-for-nothin chap
+(for she’s at the time o’ life when they say women pray for
+husbands—‘any, good Lord, any,’) and has let him into our house, and the
+chap has made off with your brooch, and m’appen many another thing
+beside.  It’s only saying that Norah is soft-hearted, and does not stick
+at a white lie—that’s all, missus.”
+
+It was curious to notice how his tone, his eyes, his whole face changed
+as he spoke to his wife; but he was the resolute man through all.  She
+knew better than to oppose him; so she went up-stairs, and told Norah her
+master wanted to speak to her, and that she would take care of the
+children in the meanwhile.
+
+Norah rose to go without a word.  Her thoughts were these:
+
+“If they tear me to pieces they shall never know through me.  He may
+come,—and then just Lord have mercy upon us all: for some of us are dead
+folk to a certainty.  But he shall do it; not me.”
+
+You may fancy, now, her look of determination as she faced her master
+alone in the dining-room; Mr. and Mrs. Chadwick having left the affair in
+their nephew’s hands, seeing that he took it up with such vehemence.
+
+“Norah!  Who was that man that came to my house last night?”
+
+“Man, sir!”  As if infinitely; surprised but it was only to gain time.
+
+“Yes; the man whom Mary let in; whom she went up-stairs to the nursery to
+tell you about; whom you came down to speak to; the same chap, I make no
+doubt, whom you took into the nursery to have your talk out with; whom
+Ailsie saw, and afterwards dreamed about; thinking, poor wench! she saw
+him say his prayers, when nothing, I’ll be bound, was farther from his
+thoughts; who took Mrs. Chadwick’s brooch, value ten pounds.  Now, Norah!
+Don’t go off!  I am as sure as that my name’s Thomas Openshaw, that you
+knew nothing of this robbery.  But I do think you’ve been imposed on, and
+that’s the truth.  Some good-for-nothing chap has been making up to you,
+and you’ve been just like all other women, and have turned a soft place
+in your heart to him; and he came last night a-lovyering, and you had him
+up in the nursery, and he made use of his opportunities, and made off
+with a few things on his way down!  Come, now, Norah: it’s no blame to
+you, only you must not be such a fool again.  Tell us,” he continued,
+“what name he gave you, Norah?  I’ll be bound it was not the right one;
+but it will be a clue for the police.”
+
+Norah drew herself up.  “You may ask that question, and taunt me with my
+being single, and with my credulity, as you will, Master Openshaw.  You’ll
+get no answer from me.  As for the brooch, and the story of theft and
+burglary; if any friend ever came to see me (which I defy you to prove,
+and deny), he’d be just as much above doing such a thing as you yourself,
+Mr. Openshaw, and more so, too; for I’m not at all sure as everything you
+have is rightly come by, or would be yours long, if every man had his
+own.”  She meant, of course, his wife; but he understood her to refer to
+his property in goods and chattels.
+
+“Now, my good woman,” said he, “I’ll just tell you truly, I never trusted
+you out and out; but my wife liked you, and I thought you had many a good
+point about you.  If you once begin to sauce me, I’ll have the police to
+you, and get out the truth in a court of justice, if you’ll not tell it
+me quietly and civilly here.  Now the best thing you can do is quietly to
+tell me who the fellow is.  Look here! a man comes to my house; asks for
+you; you take him up-stairs, a valuable brooch is missing next day; we
+know that you, and Mary, and cook, are honest; but you refuse to tell us
+who the man is.  Indeed you’ve told one lie already about him, saying no
+one was here last night.  Now I just put it to you, what do you think a
+policeman would say to this, or a magistrate?  A magistrate would soon
+make you tell the truth, my good woman.”
+
+“There’s never the creature born that should get it out of me,” said
+Norah.  “Not unless I choose to tell.”
+
+“I’ve a great mind to see,” said Mr. Openshaw, growing angry at the
+defiance.  Then, checking himself, he thought before he spoke again:
+
+“Norah, for your missus’s sake I don’t want to go to extremities.  Be a
+sensible woman, if you can.  It’s no great disgrace, after all, to have
+been taken in.  I ask you once more—as a friend—who was this man whom
+you let into my house last night?”
+
+No answer.  He repeated the question in an impatient tone.  Still no
+answer.  Norah’s lips were set in determination not to speak.
+
+“Then there is but one thing to be done.  I shall send for a policeman.”
+
+“You will not,” said Norah, starting forwards.  “You shall not, sir!  No
+policeman shall touch me.  I know nothing of the brooch, but I know this:
+ever since I was four-and-twenty I have thought more of your wife than of
+myself: ever since I saw her, a poor motherless girl put upon in her
+uncle’s house, I have thought more of serving her than of serving myself!
+I have cared for her and her child, as nobody ever cared for me.  I don’t
+cast blame on you, sir, but I say it’s ill giving up one’s life to any
+one; for, at the end, they will turn round upon you, and forsake you.  Why
+does not my missus come herself to suspect me?  Maybe she is gone for the
+police?  But I don’t stay here, either for police, or magistrate, or
+master.  You’re an unlucky lot.  I believe there’s a curse on you.  I’ll
+leave you this very day.  Yes!  I leave that poor Ailsie, too.  I will!
+No good will ever come to you!”
+
+Mr. Openshaw was utterly astonished at this speech; most of which was
+completely unintelligible to him, as may easily be supposed.  Before he
+could make up his mind what to say, or what to do, Norah had left the
+room.  I do not think he had ever really intended to send for the police
+to this old servant of his wife’s; for he had never for a moment doubted
+her perfect honesty.  But he had intended to compel her to tell him who
+the man was, and in this he was baffled.  He was, consequently, much
+irritated.  He returned to his uncle and aunt in a state of great
+annoyance and perplexity, and told them he could get nothing out of the
+woman; that some man had been in the house the night before; but that she
+refused to tell who he was.  At this moment his wife came in, greatly
+agitated, and asked what had happened to Norah; for that she had put on
+her things in passionate haste, and had left the house.
+
+“This looks suspicious,” said Mr. Chadwick.  “It is not the way in which
+an honest person would have acted.”
+
+Mr. Openshaw kept silence.  He was sorely perplexed.  But Mrs. Openshaw
+turned round on Mr. Chadwick with a sudden fierceness no one ever saw in
+her before.
+
+“You don’t know Norah, uncle!  She is gone because she is deeply hurt at
+being suspected.  O, I wish I had seen her—that I had spoken to her
+myself.  She would have told me anything.”  Alice wrung her hands.
+
+“I must confess,” continued Mr. Chadwick to his nephew, in a lower voice,
+“I can’t make you out.  You used to be a word and a blow, and oftenest
+the blow first; and now, when there is every cause for suspicion, you
+just do nought.  Your missus is a very good woman, I grant; but she may
+have been put upon as well as other folk, I suppose.  If you don’t send
+for the police, I shall.”
+
+“Very well,” replied Mr. Openshaw, surlily.  “I can’t clear Norah.  She
+won’t clear herself, as I believe she might if she would.  Only I wash my
+hands of it; for I am sure the woman herself is honest, and she’s lived a
+long time with my wife, and I don’t like her to come to shame.”
+
+“But she will then be forced to clear herself.  That, at any rate, will
+be a good thing.”
+
+“Very well, very well!  I am heart-sick of the whole business.  Come,
+Alice, come up to the babies they’ll be in a sore way.  I tell you,
+uncle!” he said, turning round once more to Mr. Chadwick, suddenly and
+sharply, after his eye had fallen on Alice’s wan, tearful, anxious face;
+“I’ll have none sending for the police after all.  I’ll buy my aunt twice
+as handsome a brooch this very day; but I’ll not have Norah suspected,
+and my missus plagued.  There’s for you.”
+
+He and his wife left the room.  Mr. Chadwick quietly waited till he was
+out of hearing, and then aid to his wife; “For all Tom’s heroics, I’m
+just quietly going for a detective, wench.  Thou need’st know nought
+about it.”
+
+He went to the police-station, and made a statement of the case.  He was
+gratified by the impression which the evidence against Norah seemed to
+make.  The men all agreed in his opinion, and steps were to be
+immediately taken to find out where she was.  Most probably, as they
+suggested, she had gone at once to the man, who, to all appearance, was
+her lover.  When Mr. Chadwick asked how they would find her out? they
+smiled, shook their heads, and spoke of mysterious but infallible ways
+and means.  He returned to his nephew’s house with a very comfortable
+opinion of his own sagacity.  He was met by his wife with a penitent
+face:
+
+“O master, I’ve found my brooch!  It was just sticking by its pin in the
+flounce of my brown silk, that I wore yesterday.  I took it off in a
+hurry, and it must have caught in it; and I hung up my gown in the
+closet.  Just now, when I was going to fold it up, there was the brooch!
+I’m very vexed, but I never dreamt but what it was lost!”
+
+Her husband muttering something very like “Confound thee and thy brooch
+too!  I wish I’d never given it thee,” snatched up his hat, and rushed
+back to the station; hoping to be in time to stop the police from
+searching for Norah.  But a detective was already gone off on the errand.
+
+Where was Norah?  Half mad with the strain of the fearful secret, she had
+hardly slept through the night for thinking what must be done.  Upon this
+terrible state of mind had come Ailsie’s questions, showing that she had
+seen the Man, as the unconscious child called her father.  Lastly came
+the suspicion of her honesty.  She was little less than crazy as she ran
+up-stairs and dashed on her bonnet and shawl; leaving all else, even her
+purse, behind her.  In that house she would not stay.  That was all she
+knew or was clear about.  She would not even see the children again, for
+fear it should weaken her.  She feared above everything Mr. Frank’s
+return to claim his wife.  She could not tell what remedy there was for a
+sorrow so tremendous, for her to stay to witness.  The desire of escaping
+from the coming event was a stronger motive for her departure than her
+soreness about the suspicions directed against her; although this last
+had been the final goad to the course she took.  She walked away almost
+at headlong speed; sobbing as she went, as she had not dared to do during
+the past night for fear of exciting wonder in those who might hear her.
+Then she stopped.  An idea came into her mind that she would leave London
+altogether, and betake herself to her native town of Liverpool.  She felt
+in her pocket for her purse, as she drew near the Euston Square station
+with this intention.  She had left it at home.  Her poor head aching, her
+eyes swollen with crying, she had to stand still, and think, as well as
+she could, where next she should bend her steps.  Suddenly the thought
+flashed into her mind that she would go and find out poor Mr. Frank.  She
+had been hardly kind to him the night before, though her heart had bled
+for him ever since.  She remembered his telling her as she inquired for
+his address, almost as she had pushed him out of the door, of some hotel
+in a street not far distant from Euston Square.  Thither she went: with
+what intention she hardly knew, but to assuage her conscience by telling
+him how much she pitied him.  In her present state she felt herself unfit
+to counsel, or restrain, or assist, or do ought else but sympathise and
+weep.  The people of the inn said such a person had been there; had
+arrived only the day before; had gone out soon after his arrival, leaving
+his luggage in their care; but had never come back.  Norah asked for
+leave to sit down, and await the gentleman’s return.  The landlady—pretty
+secure in the deposit of luggage against any probable injury—showed her
+into a room, and quietly locked the door on the outside.  Norah was
+utterly worn out, and fell asleep—a shivering, starting, uneasy slumber,
+which lasted for hours.
+
+The detective, meanwhile, had come up with her some time before she
+entered the hotel, into which he followed her.  Asking the landlady to
+detain her for an hour or so, without giving any reason beyond showing
+his authority (which made the landlady applaud herself a good deal for
+having locked her in), he went back to the police-station to report his
+proceedings.  He could have taken her directly; but his object was, if
+possible, to trace out the man who was supposed to have committed the
+robbery.  Then he heard of the discovery of the brooch; and consequently
+did not care to return.
+
+Norah slept till even the summer evening began to close in.  Then up.
+Some one was at the door.  It would be Mr. Frank; and she dizzily pushed
+back her ruffled grey hair, which had fallen over her eyes, and stood
+looking to see him.  Instead, there came in Mr. Openshaw and a policeman.
+
+“This is Norah Kennedy,” said Mr. Openshaw.
+
+“O, sir,” said Norah, “I did not touch the brooch; indeed I did not.  O,
+sir, I cannot live to be thought so badly of;” and very sick and faint,
+she suddenly sank down on the ground.  To her surprise, Mr. Openshaw
+raised her up very tenderly.  Even the policeman helped to lay her on the
+sofa; and, at Mr. Openshaw’s desire, he went for some wine and
+sandwiches; for the poor gaunt woman lay there almost as if dead with
+weariness and exhaustion.
+
+“Norah!” said Mr. Openshaw, in his kindest voice, “the brooch is found.
+It was hanging to Mrs. Chadwick’s gown.  I beg your pardon.  Most truly I
+beg your pardon, for having troubled you about it.  My wife is almost
+broken-hearted.  Eat, Norah,—or, stay, first drink this glass of wine,”
+said he, lifting her head, pouring a little down her throat.
+
+As she drank, she remembered where she was, and who she was waiting for.
+She suddenly pushed Mr. Openshaw away, saying, “O, sir, you must go.  You
+must not stop a minute.  If he comes back he will kill you.”
+
+“Alas, Norah!  I do not know who ‘he’ is.  But some one is gone away who
+will never come back: someone who knew you, and whom I am afraid you
+cared for.”
+
+“I don’t understand you, sir,” said Norah, her master’s kind and
+sorrowful manner bewildering her yet more than his words.  The policeman
+had left the room at Mr. Openshaw’s desire, and they two were alone.
+
+“You know what I mean, when I say some one is gone who will never come
+back.  I mean that he is dead!”
+
+“Who?” said Norah, trembling all over.
+
+“A poor man has been found in the Thames this morning, drowned.”
+
+“Did he drown himself?” asked Norah, solemnly.
+
+“God only knows,” replied Mr. Openshaw, in the same tone.  “Your name and
+address at our house, were found in his pocket: that, and his purse, were
+the only things, that were found upon him.  I am sorry to say it, my poor
+Norah; but you are required to go and identify him.”
+
+“To what?” asked Norah.
+
+“To say who it is.  It is always done, in order that some reason may be
+discovered for the suicide—if suicide it was.  I make no doubt he was
+the man who came to see you at our house last night.  It is very sad, I
+know.”  He made pauses between each little clause, in order to try and
+bring back her senses; which he feared were wandering—so wild and sad
+was her look.
+
+“Master Openshaw,” said she, at last, “I’ve a dreadful secret to tell
+you—only you must never breathe it to any one, and you and I must hide
+it away for ever.  I thought to have done it all by myself, but I see I
+cannot.  Yon poor man—yes! the dead, drowned creature is, I fear, Mr.
+Frank, my mistress’s first husband!”
+
+Mr. Openshaw sate down, as if shot.  He did not speak; but, after a
+while, he signed to Norah to go on.
+
+“He came to me the other night—when—God be thanked—you were all away
+at Richmond.  He asked me if his wife was dead or alive.  I was a brute,
+and thought more of our all coming home than of his sore trial: spoke out
+sharp, and said she was married again, and very content and happy: I all
+but turned him away: and now he lies dead and cold!”
+
+“God forgive me!” said Mr. Openshaw.
+
+“God forgive us all!” said Norah.  “Yon poor man needs forgiveness
+perhaps less than any one among us.  He had been among the
+savages—shipwrecked—I know not what—and he had written letters which
+had never reached my poor missus.”
+
+“He saw his child!”
+
+“He saw her—yes!  I took him up, to give his thoughts another start; for
+I believed he was going mad on my hands.  I came to seek him here, as I
+more than half promised.  My mind misgave me when I heard he had never
+come in.  O, sir I it must be him!”
+
+Mr. Openshaw rang the bell.  Norah was almost too much stunned to wonder
+at what he did.  He asked for writing materials, wrote a letter, and then
+said to Norah:
+
+“I am writing to Alice, to say I shall be unavoidably absent for a few
+days; that I have found you; that you are well, and send her your love,
+and will come home to-morrow.  You must go with me to the Police Court;
+you must identify the body: I will pay high to keep name and details out
+of the papers.”
+
+“But where are you going, sir?”
+
+He did not answer her directly.  Then he said:
+
+“Norah!  I must go with you, and look on the face of the man whom I have
+so injured,—unwittingly, it is true; but it seems to me as if I had
+killed him.  I will lay his head in the grave, as if he were my only
+brother: and how he must have hated me!  I cannot go home to my wife till
+all that I can do for him is done.  Then I go with a dreadful secret on
+my mind.  I shall never speak of it again, after these days are over.  I
+know you will not, either.”  He shook hands with her: and they never
+named the subject again, the one to the other.
+
+Norah went home to Alice the next day.  Not a word was said on the cause
+of her abrupt departure a day or two before.  Alice had been charged by
+her husband in his letter not to allude to the supposed theft of the
+brooch; so she, implicitly obedient to those whom she loved both by
+nature and habit, was entirely silent on the subject, only treated Norah
+with the most tender respect, as if to make up for unjust suspicion.
+
+Nor did Alice inquire into the reason why Mr. Openshaw had been absent
+during his uncle and aunt’s visit, after he had once said that it was
+unavoidable.  He came back, grave and quiet; and, from that time forth,
+was curiously changed.  More thoughtful, and perhaps less active; quite
+as decided in conduct, but with new and different rules for the guidance
+of that conduct.  Towards Alice he could hardly be more kind than he had
+always been; but he now seemed to look upon her as some one sacred and to
+be treated with reverence, as well as tenderness.  He throve in business,
+and made a large fortune, one half of which was settled upon her.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Long years after these events,—a few months after her mother died,
+Ailsie and her “father” (as she always called Mr. Openshaw) drove to
+a cemetery a little way out of town, and she was carried to a certain
+mound by her maid, who was then sent back to the carriage. There was a
+head-stone, with F. W. and a date. That was all. Sitting by the grave,
+Mr. Openshaw told her the story; and for the sad fate of that poor
+father whom she had never seen, he shed the only tears she ever saw
+fall from his eyes.
+
+* * * * *
+
+“A most interesting story, all through,” I said, as Jarber folded up the
+first of his series of discoveries in triumph.  “A story that goes
+straight to the heart—especially at the end.  But”—I stopped, and
+looked at Trottle.
+
+Trottle entered his protest directly in the shape of a cough.
+
+“Well!” I said, beginning to lose my patience.  “Don’t you see that I
+want you to speak, and that I don’t want you to cough?”
+
+“Quite so, ma’am,” said Trottle, in a state of respectful obstinacy which
+would have upset the temper of a saint.  “Relative, I presume, to this
+story, ma’am?”
+
+“Yes, Yes!” said Jarber.  “By all means let us hear what this good man
+has to say.”
+
+“Well, sir,” answered Trottle, “I want to know why the House over the way
+doesn’t let, and I don’t exactly see how your story answers the question.
+That’s all I have to say, sir.”
+
+I should have liked to contradict my opinionated servant, at that moment.
+But, excellent as the story was in itself, I felt that he had hit on the
+weak point, so far as Jarber’s particular purpose in reading it was
+concerned.
+
+“And that is what you have to say, is it?” repeated Jarber.  “I enter
+this room announcing that I have a series of discoveries, and you jump
+instantly to the conclusion that the first of the series exhausts my
+resources.  Have I your permission, dear lady, to enlighten this obtuse
+person, if possible, by reading Number Two?”
+
+“My work is behindhand, ma’am,” said Trottle, moving to the door, the
+moment I gave Jarber leave to go on.
+
+“Stop where you are,” I said, in my most peremptory manner, “and give Mr.
+Jarber his fair opportunity of answering your objection now you have made
+it.”
+
+Trottle sat down with the look of a martyr, and Jarber began to read with
+his back turned on the enemy more decidedly than ever.
+
+
+
+
+GOING INTO SOCIETY
+
+
+At one period of its reverses, the House fell into the occupation of a
+Showman.  He was found registered as its occupier, on the parish books of
+the time when he rented the House, and there was therefore no need of any
+clue to his name.  But, he himself was less easy to be found; for, he had
+led a wandering life, and settled people had lost sight of him, and
+people who plumed themselves on being respectable were shy of admitting
+that they had ever known anything of him.  At last, among the marsh lands
+near the river’s level, that lie about Deptford and the neighbouring
+market-gardens, a Grizzled Personage in velveteen, with a face so cut up
+by varieties of weather that he looked as if he had been tattooed, was
+found smoking a pipe at the door of a wooden house on wheels.  The wooden
+house was laid up in ordinary for the winter, near the mouth of a muddy
+creek; and everything near it, the foggy river, the misty marshes, and
+the steaming market-gardens, smoked in company with the grizzled man.  In
+the midst of this smoking party, the funnel-chimney of the wooden house
+on wheels was not remiss, but took its pipe with the rest in a
+companionable manner.
+
+On being asked if it were he who had once rented the House to Let,
+Grizzled Velveteen looked surprised, and said yes.  Then his name was
+Magsman?  That was it, Toby Magsman—which lawfully christened Robert;
+but called in the line, from a infant, Toby.  There was nothing agin Toby
+Magsman, he believed?  If there was suspicion of such—mention it!
+
+There was no suspicion of such, he might rest assured.  But, some
+inquiries were making about that House, and would he object to say why he
+left it?
+
+Not at all; why should he?  He left it, along of a Dwarf.
+
+Along of a Dwarf?
+
+Mr. Magsman repeated, deliberately and emphatically, Along of a Dwarf.
+
+Might it be compatible with Mr. Magsman’s inclination and convenience to
+enter, as a favour, into a few particulars?
+
+Mr. Magsman entered into the following particulars.
+
+It was a long time ago, to begin with;—afore lotteries and a deal more
+was done away with.  Mr. Magsman was looking about for a good pitch, and
+he see that house, and he says to himself, “I’ll have you, if you’re to
+be had.  If money’ll get you, I’ll have you.”
+
+The neighbours cut up rough, and made complaints; but Mr. Magsman don’t
+know what they _would_ have had.  It was a lovely thing.  First of all,
+there was the canvass, representin the picter of the Giant, in Spanish
+trunks and a ruff, who was himself half the heighth of the house, and was
+run up with a line and pulley to a pole on the roof, so that his Ed was
+coeval with the parapet.  Then, there was the canvass, representin the
+picter of the Albina lady, showing her white air to the Army and Navy in
+correct uniform.  Then, there was the canvass, representin the picter of
+the Wild Indian a scalpin a member of some foreign nation.  Then, there
+was the canvass, representin the picter of a child of a British Planter,
+seized by two Boa Constrictors—not that _we_ never had no child, nor no
+Constrictors neither.  Similarly, there was the canvass, representin the
+picter of the Wild Ass of the Prairies—not that _we_ never had no wild
+asses, nor wouldn’t have had ’em at a gift.  Last, there was the canvass,
+representin the picter of the Dwarf, and like him too (considerin), with
+George the Fourth in such a state of astonishment at him as His Majesty
+couldn’t with his utmost politeness and stoutness express.  The front of
+the House was so covered with canvasses, that there wasn’t a spark of
+daylight ever visible on that side.  “MAGSMAN’S AMUSEMENTS,” fifteen foot
+long by two foot high, ran over the front door and parlour winders.  The
+passage was a Arbour of green baize and gardenstuff.  A barrel-organ
+performed there unceasing.  And as to respectability,—if threepence
+ain’t respectable, what is?
+
+But, the Dwarf is the principal article at present, and he was worth the
+money.  He was wrote up as MAJOR TPSCHOFFKI, OF THE IMPERIAL BULGRADERIAN
+BRIGADE.  Nobody couldn’t pronounce the name, and it never was intended
+anybody should.  The public always turned it, as a regular rule, into
+Chopski.  In the line he was called Chops; partly on that account, and
+partly because his real name, if he ever had any real name (which was
+very dubious), was Stakes.
+
+He was a uncommon small man, he really was.  Certainly not so small as he
+was made out to be, but where _is_ your Dwarf as is?  He was a most
+uncommon small man, with a most uncommon large Ed; and what he had inside
+that Ed, nobody ever knowed but himself: even supposin himself to have
+ever took stock of it, which it would have been a stiff job for even him
+to do.
+
+The kindest little man as never growed!  Spirited, but not proud.  When
+he travelled with the Spotted Baby—though he knowed himself to be a
+nat’ral Dwarf, and knowed the Baby’s spots to be put upon him artificial,
+he nursed that Baby like a mother.  You never heerd him give a ill-name
+to a Giant.  He _did_ allow himself to break out into strong language
+respectin the Fat Lady from Norfolk; but that was an affair of the ’art;
+and when a man’s ’art has been trifled with by a lady, and the preference
+giv to a Indian, he ain’t master of his actions.
+
+He was always in love, of course; every human nat’ral phenomenon is.  And
+he was always in love with a large woman; I never knowed the Dwarf as
+could be got to love a small one.  Which helps to keep ’em the
+Curiosities they are.
+
+One sing’ler idea he had in that Ed of his, which must have meant
+something, or it wouldn’t have been there.  It was always his opinion
+that he was entitled to property.  He never would put his name to
+anything.  He had been taught to write, by the young man without arms,
+who got his living with his toes (quite a writing master _he_ was, and
+taught scores in the line), but Chops would have starved to death, afore
+he’d have gained a bit of bread by putting his hand to a paper.  This is
+the more curious to bear in mind, because HE had no property, nor hope of
+property, except his house and a sarser.  When I say his house, I mean
+the box, painted and got up outside like a reg’lar six-roomer, that he
+used to creep into, with a diamond ring (or quite as good to look at) on
+his forefinger, and ring a little bell out of what the Public believed to
+be the Drawing-room winder.  And when I say a sarser, I mean a Chaney
+sarser in which he made a collection for himself at the end of every
+Entertainment.  His cue for that, he took from me: “Ladies and gentlemen,
+the little man will now walk three times round the Cairawan, and retire
+behind the curtain.”  When he said anything important, in private life,
+he mostly wound it up with this form of words, and they was generally the
+last thing he said to me at night afore he went to bed.
+
+He had what I consider a fine mind—a poetic mind. His ideas respectin
+his property never come upon him so strong as when he sat upon a
+barrel-organ and had the handle turned. Arter the wibration had run
+through him a little time, he would screech out, “Toby, I feel my
+property coming—grind away! I’m counting my guineas by thousands,
+Toby—grind away! Toby, I shall be a man of fortun! I feel the Mint a
+jingling in me, Toby, and I’m swelling out into the Bank of England!”
+Such is the influence of music on a poetic mind. Not that he was
+partial to any other music but a barrel-organ; on the contrary, hated
+it.
+
+He had a kind of a everlasting grudge agin the Public: which is a thing
+you may notice in many phenomenons that get their living out of it.  What
+riled him most in the nater of his occupation was, that it kep him out of
+Society.  He was continiwally saying, “Toby, my ambition is, to go into
+Society.  The curse of my position towards the Public is, that it keeps
+me hout of Society.  This don’t signify to a low beast of a Indian; he
+an’t formed for Society.  This don’t signify to a Spotted Baby; _he_ an’t
+formed for Society.—I am.”
+
+Nobody never could make out what Chops done with his money. He had a
+good salary, down on the drum every Saturday as the day came round,
+besides having the run of his teeth—and he was a Woodpecker to eat—but
+all Dwarfs are. The sarser was a little income, bringing him in so
+many halfpence that he’d carry ’em for a week together, tied up in a
+pocket-handkercher. And yet he never had money. And it couldn’t be
+the Fat Lady from Norfolk, as was once supposed; because it stands to
+reason that when you have a animosity towards a Indian, which makes you
+grind your teeth at him to his face, and which can hardly hold you from
+Goosing him audible when he’s going through his War-Dance—it stands
+to reason you wouldn’t under them circumstances deprive yourself, to
+support that Indian in the lap of luxury.
+
+Most unexpected, the mystery come out one day at Egham Races.  The Public
+was shy of bein pulled in, and Chops was ringin his little bell out of
+his drawing-room winder, and was snarlin to me over his shoulder as he
+kneeled down with his legs out at the back-door—for he couldn’t be
+shoved into his house without kneeling down, and the premises wouldn’t
+accommodate his legs—was snarlin, “Here’s a precious Public for you; why
+the Devil don’t they tumble up?” when a man in the crowd holds up a
+carrier-pigeon, and cries out, “If there’s any person here as has got a
+ticket, the Lottery’s just drawed, and the number as has come up for the
+great prize is three, seven, forty-two!  Three, seven, forty-two!”  I was
+givin the man to the Furies myself, for calling off the Public’s
+attention—for the Public will turn away, at any time, to look at
+anything in preference to the thing showed ’em; and if you doubt it, get
+’em together for any indiwidual purpose on the face of the earth, and
+send only two people in late, and see if the whole company an’t far more
+interested in takin particular notice of them two than of you—I say, I
+wasn’t best pleased with the man for callin out, and wasn’t blessin him
+in my own mind, when I see Chops’s little bell fly out of winder at a old
+lady, and he gets up and kicks his box over, exposin the whole secret,
+and he catches hold of the calves of my legs and he says to me, “Carry me
+into the wan, Toby, and throw a pail of water over me or I’m a dead man,
+for I’ve come into my property!”
+
+Twelve thousand odd hundred pound, was Chops’s winnins.  He had bought a
+half-ticket for the twenty-five thousand prize, and it had come up.  The
+first use he made of his property, was, to offer to fight the Wild Indian
+for five hundred pound a side, him with a poisoned darnin-needle and the
+Indian with a club; but the Indian being in want of backers to that
+amount, it went no further.
+
+Arter he had been mad for a week—in a state of mind, in short, in
+which, if I had let him sit on the organ for only two minutes, I
+believe he would have bust—but we kep the organ from him—Mr. Chops
+come round, and behaved liberal and beautiful to all. He then sent
+for a young man he knowed, as had a wery genteel appearance and was a
+Bonnet at a gaming-booth (most respectable brought up, father havin
+been imminent in the livery stable line but unfort’nate in a commercial
+crisis, through paintin a old gray, ginger-bay, and sellin him with a
+Pedigree), and Mr. Chops said to this Bonnet, who said his name was
+Normandy, which it wasn’t:
+
+“Normandy, I’m a goin into Society.  Will you go with me?”
+
+Says Normandy: “Do I understand you, Mr. Chops, to hintimate that the
+’ole of the expenses of that move will be borne by yourself?”
+
+“Correct,” says Mr. Chops.  “And you shall have a Princely allowance
+too.”
+
+The Bonnet lifted Mr. Chops upon a chair, to shake hands with him, and
+replied in poetry, with his eyes seemingly full of tears:
+
+“My boat is on the shore,
+And my bark is on the sea,
+And I do not ask for more,
+But I’ll Go:—along with thee.”
+
+They went into Society, in a chay and four grays with silk jackets.  They
+took lodgings in Pall Mall, London, and they blazed away.
+
+In consequence of a note that was brought to Bartlemy Fair in the
+autumn of next year by a servant, most wonderful got up in milk-white
+cords and tops, I cleaned myself and went to Pall Mall, one evening
+appinted. The gentlemen was at their wine arter dinner, and Mr. Chops’s
+eyes was more fixed in that Ed of his than I thought good for him.
+There was three of ’em (in company, I mean), and I knowed the third
+well. When last met, he had on a white Roman shirt, and a bishop’s
+mitre covered with leopard-skin, and played the clarionet all wrong, in
+a band at a Wild Beast Show.
+
+This gent took on not to know me, and Mr. Chops said: “Gentlemen, this
+is a old friend of former days:” and Normandy looked at me through a
+eye-glass, and said, “Magsman, glad to see you!”—which I’ll take my oath
+he wasn’t. Mr. Chops, to git him convenient to the table, had his chair
+on a throne (much of the form of George the Fourth’s in the canvass),
+but he hardly appeared to me to be King there in any other pint of
+view, for his two gentlemen ordered about like Emperors. They was all
+dressed like May-Day—gorgeous!—And as to Wine, they swam in all sorts.
+
+I made the round of the bottles, first separate (to say I had done it),
+and then mixed ’em all together (to say I had done it), and then tried
+two of ’em as half-and-half, and then t’other two.  Altogether, I passed
+a pleasin evenin, but with a tendency to feel muddled, until I considered
+it good manners to get up and say, “Mr. Chops, the best of friends must
+part, I thank you for the wariety of foreign drains you have stood so
+’ansome, I looks towards you in red wine, and I takes my leave.”  Mr.
+Chops replied, “If you’ll just hitch me out of this over your right arm,
+Magsman, and carry me down-stairs, I’ll see you out.”  I said I couldn’t
+think of such a thing, but he would have it, so I lifted him off his
+throne.  He smelt strong of Maideary, and I couldn’t help thinking as I
+carried him down that it was like carrying a large bottle full of wine,
+with a rayther ugly stopper, a good deal out of proportion.
+
+When I set him on the door-mat in the hall, he kep me close to him by
+holding on to my coat-collar, and he whispers:
+
+“I ain’t ’appy, Magsman.”
+
+“What’s on your mind, Mr. Chops?”
+
+“They don’t use me well.  They an’t grateful to me.  They puts me on the
+mantel-piece when I won’t have in more Champagne-wine, and they locks me
+in the sideboard when I won’t give up my property.”
+
+“Get rid of ’em, Mr. Chops.”
+
+“I can’t.  We’re in Society together, and what would Society say?”
+
+“Come out of Society!” says I.
+
+“I can’t.  You don’t know what you’re talking about.  When you have once
+gone into Society, you mustn’t come out of it.”
+
+“Then if you’ll excuse the freedom, Mr. Chops,” were my remark, shaking
+my head grave, “I think it’s a pity you ever went in.”
+
+Mr. Chops shook that deep Ed of his, to a surprisin extent, and slapped
+it half a dozen times with his hand, and with more Wice than I thought
+were in him.  Then, he says, “You’re a good fellow, but you don’t
+understand.  Good-night, go along.  Magsman, the little man will now walk
+three times round the Cairawan, and retire behind the curtain.”  The last
+I see of him on that occasion was his tryin, on the extremest werge of
+insensibility, to climb up the stairs, one by one, with his hands and
+knees.  They’d have been much too steep for him, if he had been sober;
+but he wouldn’t be helped.
+
+It warn’t long after that, that I read in the newspaper of Mr. Chops’s
+being presented at court.  It was printed, “It will be recollected”—and
+I’ve noticed in my life, that it is sure to be printed that it _will_ be
+recollected, whenever it won’t—“that Mr. Chops is the individual of
+small stature, whose brilliant success in the last State Lottery
+attracted so much attention.”  Well, I says to myself, Such is Life!  He
+has been and done it in earnest at last.  He has astonished George the
+Fourth!
+
+(On account of which, I had that canvass new-painted, him with a bag of
+money in his hand, a presentin it to George the Fourth, and a lady in
+Ostrich Feathers fallin in love with him in a bag-wig, sword, and buckles
+correct.)
+
+I took the House as is the subject of present inquiries—though not the
+honour of bein acquainted—and I run Magsman’s Amusements in it thirteen
+months—sometimes one thing, sometimes another, sometimes nothin
+particular, but always all the canvasses outside.  One night, when we had
+played the last company out, which was a shy company, through its raining
+Heavens hard, I was takin a pipe in the one pair back along with the
+young man with the toes, which I had taken on for a month (though he
+never drawed—except on paper), and I heard a kickin at the street door.
+“Halloa!” I says to the young man, “what’s up!”  He rubs his eyebrows
+with his toes, and he says, “I can’t imagine, Mr. Magsman”—which he
+never could imagine nothin, and was monotonous company.
+
+The noise not leavin off, I laid down my pipe, and I took up a candle,
+and I went down and opened the door.  I looked out into the street; but
+nothin could I see, and nothin was I aware of, until I turned round
+quick, because some creetur run between my legs into the passage.  There
+was Mr. Chops!
+
+“Magsman,” he says, “take me, on the old terms, and you’ve got me; if
+it’s done, say done!”
+
+I was all of a maze, but I said, “Done, sir.”
+
+“Done to your done, and double done!” says he.  “Have you got a bit of
+supper in the house?”
+
+Bearin in mind them sparklin warieties of foreign drains as we’d
+guzzled away at in Pall Mall, I was ashamed to offer him cold sassages
+and gin-and-water; but he took ’em both and took ’em free; havin a
+chair for his table, and sittin down at it on a stool, like hold times.
+I, all of a maze all the while.
+
+It was arter he had made a clean sweep of the sassages (beef, and to the
+best of my calculations two pound and a quarter), that the wisdom as was
+in that little man began to come out of him like prespiration.
+
+“Magsman,” he says, “look upon me!  You see afore you, One as has both
+gone into Society and come out.”
+
+“O!  You _are_ out of it, Mr. Chops?  How did you get out, sir?”
+
+“SOLD OUT!” says he.  You never saw the like of the wisdom as his Ed
+expressed, when he made use of them two words.
+
+“My friend Magsman, I’ll impart to you a discovery I’ve made.  It’s
+wallable; it’s cost twelve thousand five hundred pound; it may do you
+good in life—The secret of this matter is, that it ain’t so much that a
+person goes into Society, as that Society goes into a person.”
+
+Not exactly keepin up with his meanin, I shook my head, put on a deep
+look, and said, “You’re right there, Mr. Chops.”
+
+“Magsman,” he says, twitchin me by the leg, “Society has gone into me, to
+the tune of every penny of my property.”
+
+I felt that I went pale, and though nat’rally a bold speaker, I couldn’t
+hardly say, “Where’s Normandy?”
+
+“Bolted.  With the plate,” said Mr. Chops.
+
+“And t’other one?” meaning him as formerly wore the bishop’s mitre.
+
+“Bolted.  With the jewels,” said Mr. Chops.
+
+I sat down and looked at him, and he stood up and looked at me.
+
+“Magsman,” he says, and he seemed to myself to get wiser as he got
+hoarser; “Society, taken in the lump, is all dwarfs.  At the court of St.
+James’s, they was all a doing my old business—all a goin three times
+round the Cairawan, in the hold court-suits and properties.  Elsewheres,
+they was most of ’em ringin their little bells out of make-believes.
+Everywheres, the sarser was a goin round.  Magsman, the sarser is the
+uniwersal Institution!”
+
+I perceived, you understand, that he was soured by his misfortunes, and I
+felt for Mr. Chops.
+
+“As to Fat Ladies,” he says, giving his head a tremendious one agin the
+wall, “there’s lots of _them_ in Society, and worse than the original.
+_Hers_ was a outrage upon Taste—simply a outrage upon Taste—awakenin
+contempt—carryin its own punishment in the form of a Indian.”  Here he
+giv himself another tremendious one.  “But _theirs_, Magsman, _theirs_ is
+mercenary outrages.  Lay in Cashmeer shawls, buy bracelets, strew ’em and
+a lot of ’andsome fans and things about your rooms, let it be known that
+you give away like water to all as come to admire, and the Fat Ladies
+that don’t exhibit for so much down upon the drum, will come from all the
+pints of the compass to flock about you, whatever you are.  They’ll drill
+holes in your ’art, Magsman, like a Cullender.  And when you’ve no more
+left to give, they’ll laugh at you to your face, and leave you to have
+your bones picked dry by Wulturs, like the dead Wild Ass of the Prairies
+that you deserve to be!”  Here he giv himself the most tremendious one of
+all, and dropped.
+
+I thought he was gone.  His Ed was so heavy, and he knocked it so hard,
+and he fell so stoney, and the sassagerial disturbance in him must have
+been so immense, that I thought he was gone.  But, he soon come round
+with care, and he sat up on the floor, and he said to me, with wisdom
+comin out of his eyes, if ever it come:
+
+“Magsman!  The most material difference between the two states of
+existence through which your unhappy friend has passed;” he reached out
+his poor little hand, and his tears dropped down on the moustachio which
+it was a credit to him to have done his best to grow, but it is not in
+mortals to command success,—“the difference this.  When I was out of
+Society, I was paid light for being seen.  When I went into Society, I
+paid heavy for being seen.  I prefer the former, even if I wasn’t forced
+upon it.  Give me out through the trumpet, in the hold way, to-morrow.”
+
+Arter that, he slid into the line again as easy as if he had been iled
+all over.  But the organ was kep from him, and no allusions was ever
+made, when a company was in, to his property.  He got wiser every day;
+his views of Society and the Public was luminous, bewilderin, awful; and
+his Ed got bigger and bigger as his Wisdom expanded it.
+
+He took well, and pulled ’em in most excellent for nine weeks.  At the
+expiration of that period, when his Ed was a sight, he expressed one
+evenin, the last Company havin been turned out, and the door shut, a wish
+to have a little music.
+
+“Mr. Chops,” I said (I never dropped the “Mr.” with him; the world might
+do it, but not me); “Mr. Chops, are you sure as you are in a state of
+mind and body to sit upon the organ?”
+
+His answer was this: “Toby, when next met with on the tramp, I forgive
+her and the Indian.  And I am.”
+
+It was with fear and trembling that I began to turn the handle; but he
+sat like a lamb.  I will be my belief to my dying day, that I see his Ed
+expand as he sat; you may therefore judge how great his thoughts was.  He
+sat out all the changes, and then he come off.
+
+“Toby,” he says, with a quiet smile, “the little man will now walk three
+times round the Cairawan, and retire behind the curtain.”
+
+When we called him in the morning, we found him gone into a much better
+Society than mine or Pall Mall’s.  I giv Mr. Chops as comfortable a
+funeral as lay in my power, followed myself as Chief, and had the George
+the Fourth canvass carried first, in the form of a banner.  But, the
+House was so dismal arterwards, that I giv it up, and took to the Wan
+again.
+
+* * * * *
+
+“I don’t triumph,” said Jarber, folding up the second manuscript, and
+looking hard at Trottle.  “I don’t triumph over this worthy creature.  I
+merely ask him if he is satisfied now?”
+
+“How can he be anything else?” I said, answering for Trottle, who sat
+obstinately silent.  “This time, Jarber, you have not only read us a
+delightfully amusing story, but you have also answered the question about
+the House.  Of course it stands empty now.  Who would think of taking it
+after it had been turned into a caravan?”  I looked at Trottle, as I said
+those last words, and Jarber waved his hand indulgently in the same
+direction.
+
+“Let this excellent person speak,” said Jarber.  “You were about to say,
+my good man?”—
+
+“I only wished to ask, sir,” said Trottle doggedly, “if you could kindly
+oblige me with a date or two in connection with that last story?”
+
+“A date!” repeated Jarber.  “What does the man want with dates!”
+
+“I should be glad to know, with great respect,” persisted Trottle, “if
+the person named Magsman was the last tenant who lived in the House.  It’s
+my opinion—if I may be excused for giving it—that he most decidedly was
+not.”
+
+With those words, Trottle made a low bow, and quietly left the room.
+
+There is no denying that Jarber, when we were left together, looked sadly
+discomposed.  He had evidently forgotten to inquire about dates; and, in
+spite of his magnificent talk about his series of discoveries, it was
+quite as plain that the two stories he had just read, had really and
+truly exhausted his present stock.  I thought myself bound, in common
+gratitude, to help him out of his embarrassment by a timely suggestion.
+So I proposed that he should come to tea again, on the next Monday
+evening, the thirteenth, and should make such inquiries in the meantime,
+as might enable him to dispose triumphantly of Trottle’s objection.
+
+He gallantly kissed my hand, made a neat little speech of acknowledgment,
+and took his leave.  For the rest of the week I would not encourage
+Trottle by allowing him to refer to the House at all.  I suspected he was
+making his own inquiries about dates, but I put no questions to him.
+
+On Monday evening, the thirteenth, that dear unfortunate Jarber came,
+punctual to the appointed time.  He looked so terribly harassed, that he
+was really quite a spectacle of feebleness and fatigue.  I saw, at a
+glance, that the question of dates had gone against him, that Mr. Magsman
+had not been the last tenant of the House, and that the reason of its
+emptiness was still to seek.
+
+“What I have gone through,” said Jarber, “words are not eloquent enough
+to tell.  O Sophonisba, I have begun another series of discoveries!
+Accept the last two as stories laid on your shrine; and wait to blame me
+for leaving your curiosity unappeased, until you have heard Number
+Three.”
+
+Number Three looked like a very short manuscript, and I said as much.
+Jarber explained to me that we were to have some poetry this time.  In
+the course of his investigations he had stepped into the Circulating
+Library, to seek for information on the one important subject.  All the
+Library-people knew about the House was, that a female relative of the
+last tenant, as they believed, had, just after that tenant left, sent a
+little manuscript poem to them which she described as referring to events
+that had actually passed in the House; and which she wanted the
+proprietor of the Library to publish.  She had written no address on her
+letter; and the proprietor had kept the manuscript ready to be given back
+to her (the publishing of poems not being in his line) when she might
+call for it.  She had never called for it; and the poem had been lent to
+Jarber, at his express request, to read to me.
+
+Before he began, I rang the bell for Trottle; being determined to have
+him present at the new reading, as a wholesome check on his obstinacy.  To
+my surprise Peggy answered the bell, and told me, that Trottle had
+stepped out without saying where.  I instantly felt the strongest
+possible conviction that he was at his old tricks: and that his stepping
+out in the evening, without leave, meant—Philandering.
+
+Controlling myself on my visitor’s account, I dismissed Peggy, stifled my
+indignation, and prepared, as politely as might be, to listen to Jarber.
+
+
+
+
+THREE EVENINGS IN THE HOUSE
+
+
+NUMBER ONE.
+
+
+I.
+
+Yes, it look’d dark and dreary
+That long and narrow street:
+Only the sound of the rain,
+And the tramp of passing feet,
+The duller glow of the fire,
+And gathering mists of night
+To mark how slow and weary
+The long day’s cheerless flight!
+
+II.
+
+Watching the sullen fire,
+Hearing the dreary rain,
+Drop after drop, run down
+On the darkening window-pane;
+Chill was the heart of Bertha,
+Chill as that winter day,—
+For the star of her life had risen
+Only to fade away.
+
+III.
+
+The voice that had been so strong
+To bid the snare depart,
+The true and earnest will,
+And the calm and steadfast heart,
+Were now weigh’d down by sorrow,
+Were quivering now with pain;
+The clear path now seem’d clouded,
+And all her grief in vain.
+
+IV.
+
+Duty, Right, Truth, who promised
+To help and save their own,
+Seem’d spreading wide their pinions
+To leave her there alone.
+So, turning from the Present
+To well-known days of yore,
+She call’d on them to strengthen
+And guard her soul once more.
+
+V.
+
+She thought how in her girlhood
+Her life was given away,
+The solemn promise spoken
+She kept so well to-day;
+How to her brother Herbert
+She had been help and guide,
+And how his artist-nature
+On her calm strength relied.
+
+VI.
+
+How through life’s fret and turmoil
+The passion and fire of art
+In him was soothed and quicken’d
+By her true sister heart;
+How future hopes had always
+Been for his sake alone;
+And now, what strange new feeling
+Possess’d her as its own?
+
+VII.
+
+Her home; each flower that breathed there;
+The wind’s sigh, soft and low;
+Each trembling spray of ivy;
+The river’s murmuring flow;
+The shadow of the forest;
+Sunset, or twilight dim;
+Dear as they were, were dearer
+By leaving them for him.
+
+VIII.
+
+And each year as it found her
+In the dull, feverish town,
+Saw self still more forgotten,
+And selfish care kept down
+By the calm joy of evening
+That brought him to her side,
+To warn him with wise counsel,
+Or praise with tender pride.
+
+IX.
+
+Her heart, her life, her future,
+Her genius, only meant
+Another thing to give him,
+And be therewith content.
+To-day, what words had stirr’d her,
+Her soul could not forget?
+What dream had fill’d her spirit
+With strange and wild regret?
+
+X.
+
+To leave him for another:
+Could it indeed be so?
+Could it have cost such anguish
+To bid this vision go?
+Was this her faith?  Was Herbert
+The second in her heart?
+Did it need all this struggle
+To bid a dream depart?
+
+XI.
+
+And yet, within her spirit
+A far-off land was seen;
+A home, which might have held her;
+A love, which might have been;
+And Life: not the mere being
+Of daily ebb and flow,
+But Life itself had claim’d her,
+And she had let it go!
+
+XII.
+
+Within her heart there echo’d
+Again the well-known tune
+That promised this bright future,
+And ask’d her for its own:
+Then words of sorrow, broken
+By half-reproachful pain;
+And then a farewell, spoken
+In words of cold disdain.
+
+XIII.
+
+Where now was the stern purpose
+That nerved her soul so long?
+Whence came the words she utter’d,
+So hard, so cold, so strong?
+What right had she to banish
+A hope that God had given?
+Why must she choose earth’s portion,
+And turn aside from Heaven?
+
+XIV.
+
+To-day!  Was it this morning?
+If this long, fearful strife
+Was but the work of hours,
+What would be years of life?
+Why did a cruel Heaven
+For such great suffering call?
+And why—O, still more cruel!—
+Must her own words do all?
+
+XV.
+
+Did she repent?  O Sorrow!
+Why do we linger still
+To take thy loving message,
+And do thy gentle will?
+See, her tears fall more slowly;
+The passionate murmurs cease,
+And back upon her spirit
+Flow strength, and love, and peace.
+
+XVI.
+
+The fire burns more brightly,
+The rain has passed away,
+Herbert will see no shadow
+Upon his home to-day;
+Only that Bertha greets him
+With doubly tender care,
+Kissing a fonder blessing
+Down on his golden hair.
+
+
+NUMBER TWO.
+
+
+I.
+
+The studio is deserted,
+Palette and brush laid by,
+The sketch rests on the easel,
+The paint is scarcely dry;
+And Silence—who seems always
+Within her depths to bear
+The next sound that will utter—
+Now holds a dumb despair.
+
+II.
+
+So Bertha feels it: listening
+With breathless, stony fear,
+Waiting the dreadful summons
+Each minute brings more near:
+When the young life, now ebbing,
+Shall fail, and pass away
+Into that mighty shadow
+Who shrouds the house to-day.
+
+III.
+
+But why—when the sick chamber
+Is on the upper floor—
+Why dares not Bertha enter
+Within the close-shut door?
+If he—her all—her Brother,
+Lies dying in that gloom,
+What strange mysterious power
+Has sent her from the room?
+
+IV.
+
+It is not one week’s anguish
+That can have changed her so;
+Joy has not died here lately,
+Struck down by one quick blow;
+But cruel months have needed
+Their long relentless chain,
+To teach that shrinking manner
+Of helpless, hopeless pain.
+
+V.
+
+The struggle was scarce over
+Last Christmas Eve had brought:
+The fibres still were quivering
+Of the one wounded thought,
+When Herbert—who, unconscious,
+Had guessed no inward strife—
+Bade her, in pride and pleasure,
+Welcome his fair young wife.
+
+VI.
+
+Bade her rejoice, and smiling,
+Although his eyes were dim,
+Thank’d God he thus could pay her
+The care she gave to him.
+This fresh bright life would bring her
+A new and joyous fate—
+O Bertha, check the murmur
+That cries, Too late! too late!
+
+VII.
+
+Too late!  Could she have known it
+A few short weeks before,
+That his life was completed,
+And needing hers no more,
+She might—O sad repining!
+What “might have been,” forget;
+“It was not,” should suffice us
+To stifle vain regret.
+
+VIII.
+
+He needed her no longer,
+Each day it grew more plain;
+First with a startled wonder,
+Then with a wondering pain.
+Love: why, his wife best gave it;
+Comfort: durst Bertha speak?
+Counsel: when quick resentment
+Flush’d on the young wife’s cheek.
+
+IX.
+
+No more long talks by firelight
+Of childish times long past,
+And dreams of future greatness
+Which he must reach at last;
+Dreams, where her purer instinct
+With truth unerring told
+Where was the worthless gilding,
+And where refinèd gold.
+
+X.
+
+Slowly, but surely ever,
+Dora’s poor jealous pride,
+Which she call’d love for Herbert,
+Drove Bertha from his side;
+And, spite of nervous effort
+To share their alter’d life,
+She felt a check to Herbert,
+A burden to his wife.
+
+XI.
+
+This was the least; for Bertha
+Fear’d, dreaded, _knew_ at length,
+How much his nature owed her
+Of truth, and power, and strength;
+And watch’d the daily failing
+Of all his nobler part:
+Low aims, weak purpose, telling
+In lower, weaker art.
+
+XII.
+
+And now, when he is dying,
+The last words she could hear
+Must not be hers, but given
+The bride of one short year.
+The last care is another’s;
+The last prayer must not be
+The one they learnt together
+Beside their mother’s knee.
+
+XIII.
+
+Summon’d at last: she kisses
+The clay-cold stiffening hand;
+And, reading pleading efforts
+To make her understand,
+Answers, with solemn promise,
+In clear but trembling tone,
+To Dora’s life henceforward
+She will devote her own.
+
+XIV.
+
+Now all is over.  Bertha
+Dares not remain to weep,
+But soothes the frightened Dora
+Into a sobbing sleep.
+The poor weak child will need her:
+O, who can dare complain,
+When God sends a new Duty
+To comfort each new Pain!
+
+
+NUMBER THREE.
+
+
+I.
+
+The House is all deserted
+In the dim evening gloom,
+Only one figure passes
+Slowly from room to room;
+And, pausing at each doorway,
+Seems gathering up again
+Within her heart the relics
+Of bygone joy and pain.
+
+II.
+
+There is an earnest longing
+In those who onward gaze,
+Looking with weary patience
+Towards the coming days.
+There is a deeper longing,
+More sad, more strong, more keen:
+Those know it who look backward,
+And yearn for what has been.
+
+III.
+
+At every hearth she pauses,
+Touches each well-known chair;
+Gazes from every window,
+Lingers on every stair.
+What have these months brought Bertha
+Now one more year is past?
+This Christmas Eve shall tell us,
+The third one and the last.
+
+IV.
+
+The wilful, wayward Dora,
+In those first weeks of grief,
+Could seek and find in Bertha
+Strength, soothing, and relief.
+And Bertha—last sad comfort
+True woman-heart can take—
+Had something still to suffer
+And do for Herbert’s sake.
+
+V.
+
+Spring, with her western breezes,
+From Indian islands bore
+To Bertha news that Leonard
+Would seek his home once more.
+What was it—joy, or sorrow?
+What were they—hopes, or fears?
+That flush’d her cheeks with crimson,
+And fill’d her eyes with tears?
+
+VI.
+
+He came.  And who so kindly
+Could ask and hear her tell
+Herbert’s last hours; for Leonard
+Had known and loved him well.
+Daily he came; and Bertha,
+Poor wear heart, at length,
+Weigh’d down by other’s weakness,
+Could rest upon his strength.
+
+VII.
+
+Yet not the voice of Leonard
+Could her true care beguile,
+That turn’d to watch, rejoicing,
+Dora’s reviving smile.
+So, from that little household
+The worst gloom pass’d away,
+The one bright hour of evening
+Lit up the livelong day.
+
+VIII.
+
+Days passed.  The golden summer
+In sudden heat bore down
+Its blue, bright, glowing sweetness
+Upon the scorching town.
+And sights and sounds of country
+Came in the warm soft tune
+Sung by the honey’d breezes
+Borne on the wings of June.
+
+IX.
+
+One twilight hour, but earlier
+Than usual, Bertha thought
+She knew the fresh sweet fragrance
+Of flowers that Leonard brought;
+Through open’d doors and windows
+It stole up through the gloom,
+And with appealing sweetness
+Drew Bertha from her room.
+
+X.
+
+Yes, he was there; and pausing
+Just near the open’d door,
+To check her heart’s quick beating,
+She heard—and paused still more—
+His low voice Dora’s answers—
+His pleading—Yes, she knew
+The tone—the words—the accents:
+She once had heard them too.
+
+XI.
+
+“Would Bertha blame her?”  Leonard’s
+Low, tender answer came:
+“Bertha was far too noble
+To think or dream of blame.”
+“And was he sure he loved her?”
+“Yes, with the one love given
+Once in a lifetime only,
+With one soul and one heaven!”
+
+XII.
+
+Then came a plaintive murmur,—
+“Dora had once been told
+That he and Bertha—”  “Dearest,
+Bertha is far too cold
+To love; and I, my Dora,
+If once I fancied so,
+It was a brief delusion,
+And over,—long ago.”
+
+XIII.
+
+Between the Past and Present,
+On that bleak moment’s height,
+She stood.  As some lost traveller
+By a quick flash of light
+Seeing a gulf before him,
+With dizzy, sick despair,
+Reels to clutch backward, but to find
+A deeper chasm there.
+
+XIV.
+
+The twilight grew still darker,
+The fragrant flowers more sweet,
+The stars shone out in heaven,
+The lamps gleam’d down the street;
+And hours pass’d in dreaming
+Over their new-found fate,
+Ere they could think of wondering
+Why Bertha was so late.
+
+XV.
+
+She came, and calmly listen’d;
+In vain they strove to trace
+If Herbert’s memory shadow’d
+In grief upon her face.
+No blame, no wonder show’d there,
+No feeling could be told;
+Her voice was not less steady,
+Her manner not more cold.
+
+XVI.
+
+They could not hear the anguish
+That broke in words of pain
+Through that calm summer midnight,—
+“My Herbert—mine again!”
+Yes, they have once been parted,
+But this day shall restore
+The long lost one: she claims him:
+“My Herbert—mine once more!”
+
+XVII.
+
+Now Christmas Eve returning,
+Saw Bertha stand beside
+The altar, greeting Dora,
+Again a smiling bride;
+And now the gloomy evening
+Sees Bertha pale and worn,
+Leaving the house for ever,
+To wander out forlorn.
+
+XVIII.
+
+Forlorn—nay, not so.  Anguish
+Shall do its work at length;
+Her soul, pass’d through the fire,
+Shall gain still purer strength.
+Somewhere there waits for Bertha
+An earnest noble part;
+And, meanwhile, God is with her,—
+God, and her own true heart!
+
+* * * * *
+
+I could warmly and sincerely praise the little poem, when Jarber had done
+reading it; but I could not say that it tended in any degree towards
+clearing up the mystery of the empty House.
+
+Whether it was the absence of the irritating influence of Trottle, or
+whether it was simply fatigue, I cannot say, but Jarber did not strike
+me, that evening, as being in his usual spirits.  And though he declared
+that he was not in the least daunted by his want of success thus far, and
+that he was resolutely determined to make more discoveries, he spoke in a
+languid absent manner, and shortly afterwards took his leave at rather an
+early hour.
+
+When Trottle came back, and when I indignantly taxed him with
+Philandering, he not only denied the imputation, but asserted that he had
+been employed on my service, and, in consideration of that, boldly asked
+for leave of absence for two days, and for a morning to himself
+afterwards, to complete the business, in which he solemnly declared that
+I was interested.  In remembrance of his long and faithful service to me,
+I did violence to myself, and granted his request.  And he, on his side,
+engaged to explain himself to my satisfaction, in a week’s time, on
+Monday evening the twentieth.
+
+A day or two before, I sent to Jarber’s lodgings to ask him to drop in to
+tea.  His landlady sent back an apology for him that made my hair stand
+on end.  His feet were in hot water; his head was in a flannel petticoat;
+a green shade was over his eyes; the rheumatism was in his legs; and a
+mustard-poultice was on his chest.  He was also a little feverish, and
+rather distracted in his mind about Manchester Marriages, a Dwarf, and
+Three Evenings, or Evening Parties—his landlady was not sure which—in
+an empty House, with the Water Rate unpaid.
+
+Under these distressing circumstances, I was necessarily left alone with
+Trottle.  His promised explanation began, like Jarber’s discoveries, with
+the reading of a written paper.  The only difference was that Trottle
+introduced his manuscript under the name of a Report.
+
+
+
+
+TROTTLE’S REPORT
+
+
+The curious events related in these pages would, many of them, most
+likely never have happened, if a person named Trottle had not presumed,
+contrary to his usual custom, to think for himself.
+
+The subject on which the person in question had ventured, for the first
+time in his life, to form an opinion purely and entirely his own, was one
+which had already excited the interest of his respected mistress in a
+very extraordinary degree.  Or, to put it in plainer terms still, the
+subject was no other than the mystery of the empty House.
+
+Feeling no sort of objection to set a success of his own, if possible,
+side by side with a failure of Mr. Jarber’s, Trottle made up his mind,
+one Monday evening, to try what he could do, on his own account, towards
+clearing up the mystery of the empty House.  Carefully dismissing from
+his mind all nonsensical notions of former tenants and their histories,
+and keeping the one point in view steadily before him, he started to
+reach it in the shortest way, by walking straight up to the House, and
+bringing himself face to face with the first person in it who opened the
+door to him.
+
+It was getting towards dark, on Monday evening, the thirteenth of the
+month, when Trottle first set foot on the steps of the House.  When he
+knocked at the door, he knew nothing of the matter which he was about to
+investigate, except that the landlord was an elderly widower of good
+fortune, and that his name was Forley.  A small beginning enough for a
+man to start from, certainly!
+
+On dropping the knocker, his first proceeding was to look down cautiously
+out of the corner of his right eye, for any results which might show
+themselves at the kitchen-window.  There appeared at it immediately the
+figure of a woman, who looked up inquisitively at the stranger on the
+steps, left the window in a hurry, and came back to it with an open
+letter in her hand, which she held up to the fading light.  After looking
+over the letter hastily for a moment or so, the woman disappeared once
+more.
+
+Trottle next heard footsteps shuffling and scraping along the bare hall
+of the house.  On a sudden they ceased, and the sound of two voices—a
+shrill persuading voice and a gruff resisting voice—confusedly reached
+his ears.  After a while, the voices left off speaking—a chain was
+undone, a bolt drawn back—the door opened—and Trottle stood face to
+face with two persons, a woman in advance, and a man behind her, leaning
+back flat against the wall.
+
+“Wish you good evening, sir,” says the woman, in such a sudden way, and
+in such a cracked voice, that it was quite startling to hear her.  “Chilly
+weather, ain’t it, sir?  Please to walk in.  You come from good Mr.
+Forley, don’t you, sir?”
+
+“Don’t you, sir?” chimes in the man hoarsely, making a sort of gruff echo
+of himself, and chuckling after it, as if he thought he had made a joke.
+
+If Trottle had said, “No,” the door would have been probably closed in
+his face.  Therefore, he took circumstances as he found them, and boldly
+ran all the risk, whatever it might be, of saying, “Yes.”
+
+“Quite right sir,” says the woman. “Good Mr. Forley’s letter told us
+his particular friend would be here to represent him, at dusk, on
+Monday the thirteenth—or, if not on Monday the thirteenth, then on
+Monday the twentieth, at the same time, without fail. And here you
+are on Monday the thirteenth, ain’t you, sir? Mr. Forley’s particular
+friend, and dressed all in black—quite right, sir! Please to step into
+the dining-room—it’s always kep scoured and clean against Mr. Forley
+comes here—and I’ll fetch a candle in half a minute. It gets so dark
+in the evenings, now, you hardly know where you are, do you, sir? And
+how is good Mr. Forley in his health? We trust he is better, Benjamin,
+don’t we? We are so sorry not to see him as usual, Benjamin, ain’t we?
+In half a minute, sir, if you don’t mind waiting, I’ll be back with the
+candle. Come along, Benjamin.”
+
+“Come along, Benjamin,” chimes in the echo, and chuckles again as if he
+thought he had made another joke.
+
+Left alone in the empty front-parlour, Trottle wondered what was coming
+next, as he heard the shuffling, scraping footsteps go slowly down the
+kitchen-stairs.  The front-door had been carefully chained up and bolted
+behind him on his entrance; and there was not the least chance of his
+being able to open it to effect his escape, without betraying himself by
+making a noise.
+
+Not being of the Jarber sort, luckily for himself, he took his situation
+quietly, as he found it, and turned his time, while alone, to account, by
+summing up in his own mind the few particulars which he had discovered
+thus far.  He had found out, first, that Mr. Forley was in the habit of
+visiting the house regularly.  Second, that Mr. Forley being prevented by
+illness from seeing the people put in charge as usual, had appointed a
+friend to represent him; and had written to say so.  Third, that the
+friend had a choice of two Mondays, at a particular time in the evening,
+for doing his errand; and that Trottle had accidentally hit on this time,
+and on the first of the Mondays, for beginning his own investigations.
+Fourth, that the similarity between Trottle’s black dress, as servant out
+of livery, and the dress of the messenger (whoever he might be), had
+helped the error by which Trottle was profiting.  So far, so good.  But
+what was the messenger’s errand? and what chance was there that he might
+not come up and knock at the door himself, from minute to minute, on that
+very evening?
+
+While Trottle was turning over this last consideration in his mind, he
+heard the shuffling footsteps come up the stairs again, with a flash of
+candle-light going before them.  He waited for the woman’s coming in with
+some little anxiety; for the twilight had been too dim on his getting
+into the house to allow him to see either her face or the man’s face at
+all clearly.
+
+The woman came in first, with the man she called Benjamin at her heels,
+and set the candle on the mantel-piece.  Trottle takes leave to describe
+her as an offensively-cheerful old woman, awfully lean and wiry, and
+sharp all over, at eyes, nose, and chin—devilishly brisk, smiling, and
+restless, with a dirty false front and a dirty black cap, and short
+fidgetty arms, and long hooked finger-nails—an unnaturally lusty old
+woman, who walked with a spring in her wicked old feet, and spoke with a
+smirk on her wicked old face—the sort of old woman (as Trottle thinks)
+who ought to have lived in the dark ages, and been ducked in a
+horse-pond, instead of flourishing in the nineteenth century, and taking
+charge of a Christian house.
+
+“You’ll please to excuse my son, Benjamin, won’t you, sir?” says this
+witch without a broomstick, pointing to the man behind her, propped
+against the bare wall of the dining-room, exactly as he had been propped
+against the bare wall of the passage.  “He’s got his inside dreadful bad
+again, has my son Benjamin.  And he won’t go to bed, and he will follow
+me about the house, up-stairs and downstairs, and in my lady’s chamber,
+as the song says, you know.  It’s his indisgestion, poor dear, that sours
+his temper and makes him so agravating—and indisgestion is a wearing
+thing to the best of us, ain’t it, sir?”
+
+“Ain’t it, sir?” chimes in agravating Benjamin, winking at the
+candle-light like an owl at the sunshine.
+
+Trottle examined the man curiously, while his horrid old mother was
+speaking of him.  He found “My son Benjamin” to be little and lean, and
+buttoned-up slovenly in a frowsy old great-coat that fell down to his
+ragged carpet-slippers.  His eyes were very watery, his cheeks very pale,
+and his lips very red.  His breathing was so uncommonly loud, that it
+sounded almost like a snore.  His head rolled helplessly in the monstrous
+big collar of his great-coat; and his limp, lazy hands pottered about the
+wall on either side of him, as if they were groping for a imaginary
+bottle.  In plain English, the complaint of “My son Benjamin” was
+drunkenness, of the stupid, pig-headed, sottish kind.  Drawing this
+conclusion easily enough, after a moment’s observation of the man,
+Trottle found himself, nevertheless, keeping his eyes fixed much longer
+than was necessary on the ugly drunken face rolling about in the
+monstrous big coat collar, and looking at it with a curiosity that he
+could hardly account for at first.  Was there something familiar to him
+in the man’s features?  He turned away from them for an instant, and then
+turned back to him again.  After that second look, the notion forced
+itself into his mind, that he had certainly seen a face somewhere, of
+which that sot’s face appeared like a kind of slovenly copy.  “Where?”
+thinks he to himself, “where did I last see the man whom this agravating
+Benjamin, here, so very strongly reminds me of?”
+
+It was no time, just then—with the cheerful old woman’s eye searching
+him all over, and the cheerful old woman’s tongue talking at him,
+nineteen to the dozen—for Trottle to be ransacking his memory for small
+matters that had got into wrong corners of it.  He put by in his mind
+that very curious circumstance respecting Benjamin’s face, to be taken up
+again when a fit opportunity offered itself; and kept his wits about him
+in prime order for present necessities.
+
+“You wouldn’t like to go down into the kitchen, would you?” says the
+witch without the broomstick, as familiar as if she had been Trottle’s
+mother, instead of Benjamin’s.  “There’s a bit of fire in the grate, and
+the sink in the back kitchen don’t smell to matter much to-day, and it’s
+uncommon chilly up here when a person’s flesh don’t hardly cover a
+person’s bones.  But you don’t look cold, sir, do you?  And then, why,
+Lord bless my soul, our little bit of business is so very, very little,
+it’s hardly worth while to go downstairs about it, after all.  Quite a
+game at business, ain’t it, sir?  Give-and-take that’s what I call
+it—give-and-take!”
+
+With that, her wicked old eyes settled hungrily on the region round about
+Trottle’s waistcoat-pocket, and she began to chuckle like her son,
+holding out one of her skinny hands, and tapping cheerfully in the palm
+with the knuckles of the other.  Agravating Benjamin, seeing what she was
+about, roused up a little, chuckled and tapped in imitation of her, got
+an idea of his own into his muddled head all of a sudden, and bolted it
+out charitably for the benefit of Trottle.
+
+“I say!” says Benjamin, settling himself against the wall and nodding his
+head viciously at his cheerful old mother.  “I say!  Look out.  She’ll
+skin you!”
+
+Assisted by these signs and warnings, Trottle found no difficulty in
+understanding that the business referred to was the giving and taking of
+money, and that he was expected to be the giver.  It was at this stage of
+the proceedings that he first felt decidedly uncomfortable, and more than
+half inclined to wish he was on the street-side of the house-door again.
+
+He was still cudgelling his brains for an excuse to save his pocket, when
+the silence was suddenly interrupted by a sound in the upper part of the
+house.
+
+It was not at all loud—it was a quiet, still, scraping sound—so faint
+that it could hardly have reached the quickest ears, except in an empty
+house.
+
+“Do you hear that, Benjamin?” says the old woman.  “He’s at it again,
+even in the dark, ain’t he?  P’raps you’d like to see him, sir!” says
+she, turning on Trottle, and poking her grinning face close to him.  “Only
+name it; only say if you’d like to see him before we do our little bit of
+business—and I’ll show good Forley’s friend up-stairs, just as if he was
+good Mr. Forley himself.  _My_ legs are all right, whatever Benjamin’s
+may be.  I get younger and younger, and stronger and stronger, and
+jollier and jollier, every day—that’s what I do!  Don’t mind the stairs
+on my account, sir, if you’d like to see him.”
+
+“Him?” Trottle wondered whether “him” meant a man, or a boy, or a
+domestic animal of the male species.  Whatever it meant, here was a
+chance of putting off that uncomfortable give-and-take-business, and,
+better still, a chance perhaps of finding out one of the secrets of the
+mysterious House.  Trottle’s spirits began to rise again and he said
+“Yes,” directly, with the confidence of a man who knew all about it.
+
+Benjamin’s mother took the candle at once, and lighted Trottle briskly to
+the stairs; and Benjamin himself tried to follow as usual.  But getting
+up several flights of stairs, even helped by the bannisters, was more,
+with his particular complaint, than he seemed to feel himself inclined to
+venture on.  He sat down obstinately on the lowest step, with his head
+against the wall, and the tails of his big great-coat spreading out
+magnificently on the stairs behind him and above him, like a dirty
+imitation of a court lady’s train.
+
+“Don’t sit there, dear,” says his affectionate mother, stopping to snuff
+the candle on the first landing.
+
+“I shall sit here,” says Benjamin, agravating to the last, “till the milk
+comes in the morning.”
+
+The cheerful old woman went on nimbly up the stairs to the first floor,
+and Trottle followed, with his eyes and ears wide open.  He had seen
+nothing out of the common in the front-parlour, or up the staircase, so
+far.  The House was dirty and dreary and close-smelling—but there was
+nothing about it to excite the least curiosity, except the faint scraping
+sound, which was now beginning to get a little clearer—though still not
+at all loud—as Trottle followed his leader up the stairs to the second
+floor.
+
+Nothing on the second-floor landing, but cobwebs above and bits of broken
+plaster below, cracked off from the ceiling.  Benjamin’s mother was not a
+bit out of breath, and looked all ready to go to the top of the monument
+if necessary.  The faint scraping sound had got a little clearer still;
+but Trottle was no nearer to guessing what it might be, than when he
+first heard it in the parlour downstairs.
+
+On the third, and last, floor, there were two doors; one, which was shut,
+leading into the front garret; and one, which was ajar, leading into the
+back garret.  There was a loft in the ceiling above the landing; but the
+cobwebs all over it vouched sufficiently for its not having been opened
+for some little time.  The scraping noise, plainer than ever here,
+sounded on the other side of the back garret door; and, to Trottle’s
+great relief, that was precisely the door which the cheerful old woman
+now pushed open.
+
+Trottle followed her in; and, for once in his life, at any rate, was
+struck dumb with amazement, at the sight which the inside of the room
+revealed to him.
+
+The garret was absolutely empty of everything in the shape of furniture.
+It must have been used at one time or other, by somebody engaged in a
+profession or a trade which required for the practice of it a great deal
+of light; for the one window in the room, which looked out on a wide open
+space at the back of the house, was three or four times as large, every
+way, as a garret-window usually is.  Close under this window, kneeling on
+the bare boards with his face to the door, there appeared, of all the
+creatures in the world to see alone at such a place and at such a time, a
+mere mite of a child—a little, lonely, wizen, strangely-clad boy, who
+could not at the most, have been more than five years old.  He had a
+greasy old blue shawl crossed over his breast, and rolled up, to keep the
+ends from the ground, into a great big lump on his back.  A strip of
+something which looked like the remains of a woman’s flannel petticoat,
+showed itself under the shawl, and, below that again, a pair of rusty
+black stockings, worlds too large for him, covered his legs and his
+shoeless feet.  A pair of old clumsy muffetees, which had worked
+themselves up on his little frail red arms to the elbows, and a big
+cotton nightcap that had dropped down to his very eyebrows, finished off
+the strange dress which the poor little man seemed not half big enough to
+fill out, and not near strong enough to walk about in.
+
+But there was something to see even more extraordinary than the clothes
+the child was swaddled up in, and that was the game which he was playing
+at, all by himself; and which, moreover, explained in the most unexpected
+manner the faint scraping noise that had found its way down-stairs,
+through the half-opened door, in the silence of the empty house.
+
+It has been mentioned that the child was on his knees in the garret, when
+Trottle first saw him.  He was not saying his prayers, and not crouching
+down in terror at being alone in the dark.  He was, odd and unaccountable
+as it may appear, doing nothing more or less than playing at a
+charwoman’s or housemaid’s business of scouring the floor.  Both his
+little hands had tight hold of a mangy old blacking-brush, with hardly
+any bristles left in it, which he was rubbing backwards and forwards on
+the boards, as gravely and steadily as if he had been at scouring-work
+for years, and had got a large family to keep by it.  The coming-in of
+Trottle and the old woman did not startle or disturb him in the least.  He
+just looked up for a minute at the candle, with a pair of very bright,
+sharp eyes, and then went on with his work again, as if nothing had
+happened.  On one side of him was a battered pint saucepan without a
+handle, which was his make-believe pail; and on the other a morsel of
+slate-coloured cotton rag, which stood for his flannel to wipe up with.
+After scrubbing bravely for a minute or two, he took the bit of rag, and
+mopped up, and then squeezed make-believe water out into his make-believe
+pail, as grave as any judge that ever sat on a Bench.  By the time he
+thought he had got the floor pretty dry, he raised himself upright on his
+knees, and blew out a good long breath, and set his little red arms
+akimbo, and nodded at Trottle.
+
+“There!” says the child, knitting his little downy eyebrows into a frown.
+“Drat the dirt!  I’ve cleaned up.  Where’s my beer?”
+
+Benjamin’s mother chuckled till Trottle thought she would have choked
+herself.
+
+“Lord ha’ mercy on us!” says she, “just hear the imp.  You would never
+think he was only five years old, would you, sir?  Please to tell good
+Mr. Forley you saw him going on as nicely as ever, playing at being me
+scouring the parlour floor, and calling for my beer afterwards.  That’s
+his regular game, morning, noon, and night—he’s never tired of it.  Only
+look how snug we’ve been and dressed him.  That’s my shawl a keepin his
+precious little body warm, and Benjamin’s nightcap a keepin his precious
+little head warm, and Benjamin’s stockings, drawed over his trowsers, a
+keepin his precious little legs warm.  He’s snug and happy if ever a imp
+was yet.  ‘Where’s my beer!’—say it again, little dear, say it again!”
+
+If Trottle had seen the boy, with a light and a fire in the room, clothed
+like other children, and playing naturally with a top, or a box of
+soldiers, or a bouncing big India-rubber ball, he might have been as
+cheerful under the circumstances as Benjamin’s mother herself.  But
+seeing the child reduced (as he could not help suspecting) for want of
+proper toys and proper child’s company, to take up with the mocking of an
+old woman at her scouring-work, for something to stand in the place of a
+game, Trottle, though not a family man, nevertheless felt the sight
+before him to be, in its way, one of the saddest and the most pitiable
+that he had ever witnessed.
+
+“Why, my man,” says he, “you’re the boldest little chap in all England.
+You don’t seem a bit afraid of being up here all by yourself in the
+dark.”
+
+“The big winder,” says the child, pointing up to it, “sees in the dark;
+and I see with the big winder.”  He stops a bit, and gets up on his legs,
+and looks hard at Benjamin’s mother.  “I’m a good ’un,” says he, “ain’t
+I?  I save candle.”
+
+Trottle wondered what else the forlorn little creature had been brought
+up to do without, besides candle-light; and risked putting a question as
+to whether he ever got a run in the open air to cheer him up a bit.  O,
+yes, he had a run now and then, out of doors (to say nothing of his runs
+about the house), the lively little cricket—a run according to good Mr.
+Forley’s instructions, which were followed out carefully, as good Mr.
+Forley’s friend would be glad to hear, to the very letter.
+
+As Trottle could only have made one reply to this, namely, that good Mr.
+Forley’s instructions were, in his opinion, the instructions of an
+infernal scamp; and as he felt that such an answer would naturally prove
+the death-blow to all further discoveries on his part, he gulped down his
+feelings before they got too many for him, and held his tongue, and
+looked round towards the window again to see what the forlorn little boy
+was going to amuse himself with next.
+
+The child had gathered up his blacking-brush and bit of rag, and had put
+them into the old tin saucepan; and was now working his way, as well as
+his clothes would let him, with his make-believe pail hugged up in his
+arms, towards a door of communication which led from the back to the
+front garret.
+
+“I say,” says he, looking round sharply over his shoulder, “what are you
+two stopping here for?  I’m going to bed now—and so I tell you!”
+
+With that, he opened the door, and walked into the front room.  Seeing
+Trottle take a step or two to follow him, Benjamin’s mother opened her
+wicked old eyes in a state of great astonishment.
+
+“Mercy on us!” says she, “haven’t you seen enough of him yet?”
+
+“No,” says Trottle.  “I should like to see him go to bed.”
+
+Benjamin’s mother burst into such a fit of chuckling that the loose
+extinguisher in the candlestick clattered again with the shaking of her
+hand.  To think of good Mr. Forley’s friend taking ten times more trouble
+about the imp than good Mr. Forley himself!  Such a joke as that,
+Benjamin’s mother had not often met with in the course of her life, and
+she begged to be excused if she took the liberty of having a laugh at it.
+
+Leaving her to laugh as much as she pleased, and coming to a pretty
+positive conclusion, after what he had just heard, that Mr. Forley’s
+interest in the child was not of the fondest possible kind, Trottle
+walked into the front room, and Benjamin’s mother, enjoying herself
+immensely, followed with the candle.
+
+There were two pieces of furniture in the front garret.  One, an old
+stool of the sort that is used to stand a cask of beer on; and the other
+a great big ricketty straddling old truckle bedstead.  In the middle of
+this bedstead, surrounded by a dim brown waste of sacking, was a kind of
+little island of poor bedding—an old bolster, with nearly all the
+feathers out of it, doubled in three for a pillow; a mere shred of
+patchwork counter-pane, and a blanket; and under that, and peeping out a
+little on either side beyond the loose clothes, two faded chair cushions
+of horsehair, laid along together for a sort of makeshift mattress.  When
+Trottle got into the room, the lonely little boy had scrambled up on the
+bedstead with the help of the beer-stool, and was kneeling on the outer
+rim of sacking with the shred of counterpane in his hands, just making
+ready to tuck it in for himself under the chair cushions.
+
+“I’ll tuck you up, my man,” says Trottle.  “Jump into bed, and let me
+try.”
+
+“I mean to tuck myself up,” says the poor forlorn child, “and I don’t
+mean to jump.  I mean to crawl, I do—and so I tell you!”
+
+With that, he set to work, tucking in the clothes tight all down the
+sides of the cushions, but leaving them open at the foot.  Then, getting
+up on his knees, and looking hard at Trottle as much as to say, “What do
+you mean by offering to help such a handy little chap as me?” he began to
+untie the big shawl for himself, and did it, too, in less than half a
+minute.  Then, doubling the shawl up loose over the foot of the bed, he
+says, “I say, look here,” and ducks under the clothes, head first,
+worming his way up and up softly, under the blanket and counterpane, till
+Trottle saw the top of the large nightcap slowly peep out on the bolster.
+This over-sized head-gear of the child’s had so shoved itself down in the
+course of his journey to the pillow, under the clothes, that when he got
+his face fairly out on the bolster, he was all nightcap down to his
+mouth.  He soon freed himself, however, from this slight encumbrance by
+turning the ends of the cap up gravely to their old place over his
+eyebrows—looked at Trottle—said, “Snug, ain’t it?  Good-bye!”—popped
+his face under the clothes again—and left nothing to be seen of him but
+the empty peak of the big nightcap standing up sturdily on end in the
+middle of the bolster.
+
+“What a young limb it is, ain’t it?” says Benjamin’s mother, giving
+Trottle a cheerful dig with her elbow.  “Come on! you won’t see no more
+of him to-night!”
+
+“And so I tell you!” sings out a shrill, little voice under the
+bedclothes, chiming in with a playful finish to the old woman’s last
+words.
+
+If Trottle had not been, by this time, positively resolved to follow the
+wicked secret which accident had mixed him up with, through all its
+turnings and windings, right on to the end, he would have probably
+snatched the boy up then and there, and carried him off from his garret
+prison, bed-clothes and all.  As it was, he put a strong check on
+himself, kept his eye on future possibilities, and allowed Benjamin’s
+mother to lead him down-stairs again.
+
+“Mind them top bannisters,” says she, as Trottle laid his hand on them.
+“They are as rotten as medlars every one of ’em.”
+
+“When people come to see the premises,” says Trottle, trying to feel his
+way a little farther into the mystery of the House, “you don’t bring many
+of them up here, do you?”
+
+“Bless your heart alive!” says she, “nobody ever comes now.  The outside
+of the house is quite enough to warn them off.  Mores the pity, as I say.
+It used to keep me in spirits, staggering ’em all, one after another,
+with the frightful high rent—specially the women, drat ’em.  ‘What’s the
+rent of this house?’—‘Hundred and twenty pound a-year!’—‘Hundred and
+twenty? why, there ain’t a house in the street as lets for more than
+eighty!’—‘Likely enough, ma’am; other landlords may lower their rents if
+they please; but this here landlord sticks to his rights, and means to
+have as much for his house as his father had before him!’—‘But the
+neighbourhood’s gone off since then!’—‘Hundred and twenty pound,
+ma’am.’—‘The landlord must be mad!’—‘Hundred and twenty pound,
+ma’am.’—‘Open the door you impertinent woman!’  Lord! what a happiness
+it was to see ’em bounce out, with that awful rent a-ringing in their
+ears all down the street!”
+
+She stopped on the second-floor landing to treat herself to another
+chuckle, while Trottle privately posted up in his memory what he had just
+heard.  “Two points made out,” he thought to himself: “the house is kept
+empty on purpose, and the way it’s done is to ask a rent that nobody will
+pay.”
+
+“Ah, deary me!” says Benjamin’s mother, changing the subject on a
+sudden, and twisting back with a horrid, greedy quickness to those
+awkward money-matters which she had broached down in the parlour. “What
+we’ve done, one way and another for Mr. Forley, it isn’t in words to
+tell! That nice little bit of business of ours ought to be a bigger bit
+of business, considering the trouble we take, Benjamin and me, to make
+the imp upstairs as happy as the day is long. If good Mr. Forley would
+only please to think a little more of what a deal he owes to Benjamin
+and me—”
+
+“That’s just it,” says Trottle, catching her up short in desperation, and
+seeing his way, by the help of those last words of hers, to slipping
+cleverly through her fingers.  “What should you say, if I told you that
+Mr. Forley was nothing like so far from thinking about that little matter
+as you fancy?  You would be disappointed, now, if I told you that I had
+come to-day without the money?”—(her lank old jaw fell, and her
+villainous old eyes glared, in a perfect state of panic, at that!)—“But
+what should you say, if I told you that Mr. Forley was only waiting for
+my report, to send me here next Monday, at dusk, with a bigger bit of
+business for us two to do together than ever you think for?  What should
+you say to that?”
+
+The old wretch came so near to Trottle, before she answered, and jammed
+him up confidentially so close into the corner of the landing, that his
+throat, in a manner, rose at her.
+
+“Can you count it off, do you think, on more than that?” says she,
+holding up her four skinny fingers and her long crooked thumb, all of a
+tremble, right before his face.
+
+“What do you say to two hands, instead of one?” says he, pushing past
+her, and getting down-stairs as fast as he could.
+
+What she said Trottle thinks it best not to report, seeing that the old
+hypocrite, getting next door to light-headed at the golden prospect
+before her, took such liberties with unearthly names and persons which
+ought never to have approached her lips, and rained down such an awful
+shower of blessings on Trottle’s head, that his hair almost stood on end
+to hear her.  He went on down-stairs as fast as his feet would carry him,
+till he was brought up all standing, as the sailors say, on the last
+flight, by agravating Benjamin, lying right across the stair, and fallen
+off, as might have been expected, into a heavy drunken sleep.
+
+The sight of him instantly reminded Trottle of the curious half likeness
+which he had already detected between the face of Benjamin and the face
+of another man, whom he had seen at a past time in very different
+circumstances.  He determined, before leaving the House, to have one more
+look at the wretched muddled creature; and accordingly shook him up
+smartly, and propped him against the staircase wall, before his mother
+could interfere.
+
+“Leave him to me; I’ll freshen him up,” says Trottle to the old woman,
+looking hard in Benjamin’s face, while he spoke.
+
+The fright and surprise of being suddenly woke up, seemed, for about a
+quarter of a minute, to sober the creature.  When he first opened his
+eyes, there was a new look in them for a moment, which struck home to
+Trottle’s memory as quick and as clear as a flash of light.  The old
+maudlin sleepy expression came back again in another instant, and blurred
+out all further signs and tokens of the past.  But Trottle had seen
+enough in the moment before it came; and he troubled Benjamin’s face with
+no more inquiries.
+
+“Next Monday, at dusk,” says he, cutting short some more of the old
+woman’s palaver about Benjamin’s indisgestion.  “I’ve got no more time to
+spare, ma’am, to-night: please to let me out.”
+
+With a few last blessings, a few last dutiful messages to good Mr.
+Forley, and a few last friendly hints not to forget next Monday at
+dusk, Trottle contrived to struggle through the sickening business of
+leave-taking; to get the door opened; and to find himself, to his own
+indescribable relief, once more on the outer side of the House To Let.
+
+
+
+
+LET AT LAST
+
+
+“There, ma’am!” said Trottle, folding up the manuscript from which he had
+been reading, and setting it down with a smart tap of triumph on the
+table.  “May I venture to ask what you think of that plain statement, as
+a guess on my part (and not on Mr. Jarber’s) at the riddle of the empty
+House?”
+
+For a minute or two I was unable to say a word.  When I recovered a
+little, my first question referred to the poor forlorn little boy.
+
+“To-day is Monday the twentieth,” I said.  “Surely you have not let a
+whole week go by without trying to find out something more?”
+
+“Except at bed-time, and meals, ma’am,” answered Trottle, “I have not let
+an hour go by.  Please to understand that I have only come to an end of
+what I have written, and not to an end of what I have done.  I wrote down
+those first particulars, ma’am, because they are of great importance, and
+also because I was determined to come forward with my written documents,
+seeing that Mr. Jarber chose to come forward, in the first instance, with
+his.  I am now ready to go on with the second part of my story as shortly
+and plainly as possible, by word of mouth.  The first thing I must clear
+up, if you please, is the matter of Mr. Forley’s family affairs.  I have
+heard you speak of them, ma’am, at various times; and I have understood
+that Mr. Forley had two children only by his deceased wife, both
+daughters.  The eldest daughter married, to her father’s entire
+satisfaction, one Mr. Bayne, a rich man, holding a high government
+situation in Canada.  She is now living there with her husband, and her
+only child, a little girl of eight or nine years old.  Right so far, I
+think, ma’am?”
+
+“Quite right,” I said.
+
+“The second daughter,” Trottle went on, “and Mr. Forley’s favourite, set
+her father’s wishes and the opinions of the world at flat defiance, by
+running away with a man of low origin—a mate of a merchant-vessel, named
+Kirkland.  Mr. Forley not only never forgave that marriage, but vowed
+that he would visit the scandal of it heavily in the future on husband
+and wife.  Both escaped his vengeance, whatever he meant it to be.  The
+husband was drowned on his first voyage after his marriage, and the wife
+died in child-bed.  Right again, I believe, ma’am?”
+
+“Again quite right.”
+
+“Having got the family matter all right, we will now go back, ma’am,
+to me and my doings. Last Monday, I asked you for leave of absence for
+two days; I employed the time in clearing up the matter of Benjamin’s
+face. Last Saturday I was out of the way when you wanted me. I played
+truant, ma’am, on that occasion, in company with a friend of mine, who
+is managing clerk in a lawyer’s office; and we both spent the morning
+at Doctors’ Commons, over the last will and testament of Mr. Forley’s
+father. Leaving the will-business for a moment, please to follow me
+first, if you have no objection, into the ugly subject of Benjamin’s
+face. About six or seven years ago (thanks to your kindness) I had
+a week’s holiday with some friends of mine who live in the town of
+Pendlebury. One of those friends (the only one now left in the place)
+kept a chemist’s shop, and in that shop I was made acquainted with
+one of the two doctors in the town, named Barsham. This Barsham was a
+first-rate surgeon, and might have got to the top of his profession, if
+he had not been a first-rate blackguard. As it was, he both drank and
+gambled; nobody would have anything to do with him in Pendlebury; and,
+at the time when I was made known to him in the chemist’s shop, the
+other doctor, Mr. Dix, who was not to be compared with him for surgical
+skill, but who was a respectable man, had got all the practice; and
+Barsham and his old mother were living together in such a condition of
+utter poverty, that it was a marvel to everybody how they kept out of
+the parish workhouse.”
+
+“Benjamin and Benjamin’s mother!”
+
+“Exactly, ma’am.  Last Thursday morning (thanks to your kindness, again)
+I went to Pendlebury to my friend the chemist, to ask a few questions
+about Barsham and his mother.  I was told that they had both left the
+town about five years since.  When I inquired into the circumstances,
+some strange particulars came out in the course of the chemist’s answer.
+You know I have no doubt, ma’am, that poor Mrs. Kirkland was confined
+while her husband was at sea, in lodgings at a village called Flatfield,
+and that she died and was buried there.  But what you may not know is,
+that Flatfield is only three miles from Pendlebury; that the doctor who
+attended on Mrs. Kirkland was Barsham; that the nurse who took care of
+her was Barsham’s mother; and that the person who called them both in,
+was Mr. Forley.  Whether his daughter wrote to him, or whether he heard
+of it in some other way, I don’t know; but he was with her (though he had
+sworn never to see her again when she married) a month or more before her
+confinement, and was backwards and forwards a good deal between Flatfield
+and Pendlebury.  How he managed matters with the Barshams cannot at
+present be discovered; but it is a fact that he contrived to keep the
+drunken doctor sober, to everybody’s amazement.  It is a fact that
+Barsham went to the poor woman with all his wits about him.  It is a fact
+that he and his mother came back from Flatfield after Mrs. Kirkland’s
+death, packed up what few things they had, and left the town mysteriously
+by night.  And, lastly, it is also a fact that the other doctor, Mr. Dix,
+was not called in to help, till a week after the birth _and burial_ of
+the child, when the mother was sinking from exhaustion—exhaustion (to
+give the vagabond, Barsham, his due) not produced, in Mr. Dix’s opinion,
+by improper medical treatment, but by the bodily weakness of the poor
+woman herself—”
+
+“Burial of the child?” I interrupted, trembling all over.  “Trottle! you
+spoke that word ‘burial’ in a very strange way—you are fixing your eyes
+on me now with a very strange look—”
+
+Trottle leaned over close to me, and pointed through the window to the
+empty house.
+
+“The child’s death is registered, at Pendlebury,” he said, “on Barsham’s
+certificate, under the head of Male Infant, Still-Born.  The child’s
+coffin lies in the mother’s grave, in Flatfield churchyard.  The child
+himself—as surely as I live and breathe, is living and breathing now—a
+castaway and a prisoner in that villainous house!”
+
+I sank back in my chair.
+
+“It’s guess-work, so far, but it is borne in on my mind, for all that, as
+truth.  Rouse yourself, ma’am, and think a little.  The last I hear of
+Barsham, he is attending Mr. Forley’s disobedient daughter.  The next I
+see of Barsham, he is in Mr. Forley’s house, trusted with a secret.  He
+and his mother leave Pendlebury suddenly and suspiciously five years
+back; and he and his mother have got a child of five years old, hidden
+away in the house.  Wait! please to wait—I have not done yet.  The will
+left by Mr. Forley’s father, strengthens the suspicion.  The friend I
+took with me to Doctors’ Commons, made himself master of the contents of
+that will; and when he had done so, I put these two questions to him.
+‘Can Mr. Forley leave his money at his own discretion to anybody he
+pleases?’  ‘No,’ my friend says, ‘his father has left him with only a
+life interest in it.’  ‘Suppose one of Mr. Forley’s married daughters has
+a girl, and the other a boy, how would the money go?’  ‘It would all go,’
+my friend says, ‘to the boy, and it would be charged with the payment of
+a certain annual income to his female cousin.  After her death, it would
+go back to the male descendant, and to his heirs.’  Consider that, ma’am!
+The child of the daughter whom Mr. Forley hates, whose husband has been
+snatched away from his vengeance by death, takes his whole property in
+defiance of him; and the child of the daughter whom he loves, is left a
+pensioner on her low-born boy-cousin for life!  There was good—too good
+reason—why that child of Mrs. Kirkland’s should be registered stillborn.
+And if, as I believe, the register is founded on a false certificate,
+there is better, still better reason, why the existence of the child
+should be hidden, and all trace of his parentage blotted out, in the
+garret of that empty house.”
+
+He stopped, and pointed for the second time to the dim, dust-covered
+garret-windows opposite.  As he did so, I was startled—a very slight
+matter sufficed to frighten me now—by a knock at the door of the room in
+which we were sitting.
+
+My maid came in, with a letter in her hand.  I took it from her.  The
+mourning card, which was all the envelope enclosed, dropped from my
+hands.
+
+George Forley was no more.  He had departed this life three days since,
+on the evening of Friday.
+
+“Did our last chance of discovering the truth,” I asked, “rest with
+_him_?  Has it died with _his_ death?”
+
+“Courage, ma’am!  I think not.  Our chance rests on our power to make
+Barsham and his mother confess; and Mr. Forley’s death, by leaving them
+helpless, seems to put that power into our hands.  With your permission,
+I will not wait till dusk to-day, as I at first intended, but will make
+sure of those two people at once.  With a policeman in plain clothes to
+watch the house, in case they try to leave it; with this card to vouch
+for the fact of Mr. Forley’s death; and with a bold acknowledgment on my
+part of having got possession of their secret, and of being ready to use
+it against them in case of need, I think there is little doubt of
+bringing Barsham and his mother to terms.  In case I find it impossible
+to get back here before dusk, please to sit near the window, ma’am, and
+watch the house, a little before they light the street-lamps.  If you see
+the front-door open and close again, will you be good enough to put on
+your bonnet, and come across to me immediately?  Mr. Forley’s death may,
+or may not, prevent his messenger from coming as arranged.  But, if the
+person does come, it is of importance that you, as a relative of Mr.
+Forley’s should be present to see him, and to have that proper influence
+over him which I cannot pretend to exercise.”
+
+The only words I could say to Trottle as he opened the door and left me,
+were words charging him to take care that no harm happened to the poor
+forlorn little boy.
+
+Left alone, I drew my chair to the window; and looked out with a beating
+heart at the guilty house.  I waited and waited through what appeared to
+me to be an endless time, until I heard the wheels of a cab stop at the
+end of the street.  I looked in that direction, and saw Trottle get out
+of the cab alone, walk up to the house, and knock at the door.  He was
+let in by Barsham’s mother.  A minute or two later, a decently-dressed
+man sauntered past the house, looked up at it for a moment, and sauntered
+on to the corner of the street close by.  Here he leant against the post,
+and lighted a cigar, and stopped there smoking in an idle way, but
+keeping his face always turned in the direction of the house-door.
+
+I waited and waited still.  I waited and waited, with my eyes riveted to
+the door of the house.  At last I thought I saw it open in the dusk, and
+then felt sure I heard it shut again softly.  Though I tried hard to
+compose myself, I trembled so that I was obliged to call for Peggy to
+help me on with my bonnet and cloak, and was forced to take her arm to
+lean on, in crossing the street.
+
+Trottle opened the door to us, before we could knock.  Peggy went back,
+and I went in.  He had a lighted candle in his hand.
+
+“It has happened, ma’am, as I thought it would,” he whispered, leading me
+into the bare, comfortless, empty parlour.  “Barsham and his mother have
+consulted their own interests, and have come to terms.  My guess-work is
+guess-work no longer.  It is now what I felt it was—Truth!”
+
+Something strange to me—something which women who are mothers must often
+know—trembled suddenly in my heart, and brought the warm tears of my
+youthful days thronging back into my eyes.  I took my faithful old
+servant by the hand, and asked him to let me see Mrs. Kirkland’s child,
+for his mother’s sake.
+
+“If you desire it, ma’am,” said Trottle, with a gentleness of manner that
+I had never noticed in him before.  “But pray don’t think me wanting in
+duty and right feeling, if I beg you to try and wait a little.  You are
+agitated already, and a first meeting with the child will not help to
+make you so calm, as you would wish to be, if Mr. Forley’s messenger
+comes.  The little boy is safe up-stairs.  Pray think first of trying to
+compose yourself for a meeting with a stranger; and believe me you shall
+not leave the house afterwards without the child.”
+
+I felt that Trottle was right, and sat down as patiently as I could in a
+chair he had thoughtfully placed ready for me.  I was so horrified at the
+discovery of my own relation’s wickedness that when Trottle proposed to
+make me acquainted with the confession wrung from Barsham and his mother,
+I begged him to spare me all details, and only to tell me what was
+necessary about George Forley.
+
+“All that can be said for Mr. Forley, ma’am, is, that he was just
+scrupulous enough to hide the child’s existence and blot out its
+parentage here, instead of consenting, at the first, to its death, or
+afterwards, when the boy grew up, to turning him adrift, absolutely
+helpless in the world.  The fraud has been managed, ma’am, with the
+cunning of Satan himself.  Mr. Forley had the hold over the Barshams,
+that they had helped him in his villany, and that they were dependent on
+him for the bread they eat.  He brought them up to London to keep them
+securely under his own eye.  He put them into this empty house (taking it
+out of the agent’s hands previously, on pretence that he meant to manage
+the letting of it himself); and by keeping the house empty, made it the
+surest of all hiding places for the child.  Here, Mr. Forley could come,
+whenever he pleased, to see that the poor lonely child was not absolutely
+starved; sure that his visits would only appear like looking after his
+own property.  Here the child was to have been trained to believe himself
+Barsham’s child, till he should be old enough to be provided for in some
+situation, as low and as poor as Mr. Forley’s uneasy conscience would let
+him pick out.  He may have thought of atonement on his death-bed; but not
+before—I am only too certain of it—not before!”
+
+A low, double knock startled us.
+
+“The messenger!” said Trottle, under his breath.  He went out instantly
+to answer the knock; and returned, leading in a respectable-looking
+elderly man, dressed like Trottle, all in black, with a white cravat, but
+otherwise not at all resembling him.
+
+“I am afraid I have made some mistake,” said the stranger.
+
+Trottle, considerately taking the office of explanation into his own
+hands, assured the gentleman that there was no mistake; mentioned to him
+who I was; and asked him if he had not come on business connected with
+the late Mr. Forley.  Looking greatly astonished, the gentleman answered,
+“Yes.”  There was an awkward moment of silence, after that.  The stranger
+seemed to be not only startled and amazed, but rather distrustful and
+fearful of committing himself as well.  Noticing this, I thought it best
+to request Trottle to put an end to further embarrassment, by stating all
+particulars truthfully, as he had stated them to me; and I begged the
+gentleman to listen patiently for the late Mr. Forley’s sake.  He bowed
+to me very respectfully, and said he was prepared to listen with the
+greatest interest.
+
+It was evident to me—and, I could see, to Trottle also—that we were not
+dealing, to say the least, with a dishonest man.
+
+“Before I offer any opinion on what I have heard,” he said, earnestly and
+anxiously, after Trottle had done, “I must be allowed, in justice to
+myself, to explain my own apparent connection with this very strange and
+very shocking business.  I was the confidential legal adviser of the late
+Mr. Forley, and I am left his executor.  Rather more than a fortnight
+back, when Mr. Forley was confined to his room by illness, he sent for
+me, and charged me to call and pay a certain sum of money here, to a man
+and woman whom I should find taking charge of the house.  He said he had
+reasons for wishing the affair to be kept a secret.  He begged me so to
+arrange my engagements that I could call at this place either on Monday
+last, or to-day, at dusk; and he mentioned that he would write to warn
+the people of my coming, without mentioning my name (Dalcott is my name),
+as he did not wish to expose me to any future importunities on the part
+of the man and woman.  I need hardly tell you that this commission struck
+me as being a strange one; but, in my position with Mr. Forley, I had no
+resource but to accept it without asking questions, or to break off my
+long and friendly connection with my client.  I chose the first
+alternative.  Business prevented me from doing my errand on Monday
+last—and if I am here to-day, notwithstanding Mr. Forley’s unexpected
+death, it is emphatically because I understood nothing of the matter, on
+knocking at this door; and therefore felt myself bound, as executor, to
+clear it up.  That, on my word of honour, is the whole truth, so far as I
+am personally concerned.”
+
+“I feel quite sure of it, sir,” I answered.
+
+“You mentioned Mr. Forley’s death, just now, as unexpected.  May I
+inquire if you were present, and if he has left any last instructions?”
+
+“Three hours before Mr. Forley’s death,” said Mr. Dalcott, “his medical
+attendant left him apparently in a fair way of recovery.  The change for
+the worse took place so suddenly, and was accompanied by such severe
+suffering, to prevent him from communicating his last wishes to any one.
+When I reached his house, he was insensible.  I have since examined his
+papers.  Not one of them refers to the present time or to the serious
+matter which now occupies us.  In the absence of instructions I must act
+cautiously on what you have told me; but I will be rigidly fair and just
+at the same time.  The first thing to be done,” he continued, addressing
+himself to Trottle, “is to hear what the man and woman, down-stairs, have
+to say.  If you can supply me with writing-materials, I will take their
+declarations separately on the spot, in your presence, and in the
+presence of the policeman who is watching the house.  To-morrow I will
+send copies of those declarations, accompanied by a full statement of the
+case, to Mr. and Mrs. Bayne in Canada (both of whom know me well as the
+late Mr. Forley’s legal adviser); and I will suspend all proceedings, on
+my part, until I hear from them, or from their solicitor in London.  In
+the present posture of affairs this is all I can safely do.”
+
+We could do no less than agree with him, and thank him for his frank and
+honest manner of meeting us.  It was arranged that I should send over the
+writing-materials from my lodgings; and, to my unutterable joy and
+relief, it was also readily acknowledged that the poor little orphan boy
+could find no fitter refuge than my old arms were longing to offer him,
+and no safer protection for the night than my roof could give.  Trottle
+hastened away up-stairs, as actively as if he had been a young man, to
+fetch the child down.
+
+And he brought him down to me without another moment of delay, and I went
+on my knees before the poor little Mite, and embraced him, and asked him
+if he would go with me to where I lived?  He held me away for a moment,
+and his wan, shrewd little eyes looked sharp at me.  Then he clung close
+to me all at once, and said:
+
+“I’m a-going along with you, I am—and so I tell you!”
+
+For inspiring the poor neglected child with this trust in my old self, I
+thanked Heaven, then, with all my heart and soul, and I thank it now!
+
+I bundled the poor darling up in my own cloak, and I carried him in my
+own arms across the road.  Peggy was lost in speechless amazement to
+behold me trudging out of breath up-stairs, with a strange pair of poor
+little legs under my arm; but, she began to cry over the child the moment
+she saw him, like a sensible woman as she always was, and she still cried
+her eyes out over him in a comfortable manner, when he at last lay fast
+asleep, tucked up by my hands in Trottle’s bed.
+
+“And Trottle, bless you, my dear man,” said I, kissing his hand, as he
+looked on: “the forlorn baby came to this refuge through you, and he will
+help you on your way to Heaven.”
+
+Trottle answered that I was his dear mistress, and immediately went and
+put his head out at an open window on the landing, and looked into the
+back street for a quarter of an hour.
+
+That very night, as I sat thinking of the poor child, and of another poor
+child who is never to be thought about enough at Christmas-time, the idea
+came into my mind which I have lived to execute, and in the realisation
+of which I am the happiest of women this day.
+
+“The executor will sell that House, Trottle?” said I.
+
+“Not a doubt of it, ma’am, if he can find a purchaser.”
+
+“I’ll buy it.”
+
+I have often seen Trottle pleased; but, I never saw him so perfectly
+enchanted as he was when I confided to him, which I did, then and there,
+the purpose that I had in view.
+
+To make short of a long story—and what story would not be long, coming
+from the lips of an old woman like me, unless it was made short by main
+force!—I bought the House.  Mrs. Bayne had her father’s blood in her;
+she evaded the opportunity of forgiving and generous reparation that was
+offered her, and disowned the child; but, I was prepared for that, and
+loved him all the more for having no one in the world to look to, but me.
+
+I am getting into a flurry by being over-pleased, and I dare say I am as
+incoherent as need be.  I bought the House, and I altered it from the
+basement to the roof, and I turned it into a Hospital for Sick Children.
+
+Never mind by what degrees my little adopted boy came to the knowledge of
+all the sights and sounds in the streets, so familiar to other children
+and so strange to him; never mind by what degrees he came to be pretty,
+and childish, and winning, and companionable, and to have pictures and
+toys about him, and suitable playmates.  As I write, I look across the
+road to my Hospital, and there is the darling (who has gone over to play)
+nodding at me out of one of the once lonely windows, with his dear chubby
+face backed up by Trottle’s waistcoat as he lifts my pet for “Grandma” to
+see.
+
+Many an Eye I see in that House now, but it is never in solitude, never
+in neglect.  Many an Eye I see in that House now, that is more and more
+radiant every day with the light of returning health.  As my precious
+darling has changed beyond description for the brighter and the better,
+so do the not less precious darlings of poor women change in that House
+every day in the year.  For which I humbly thank that Gracious Being whom
+the restorer of the Widow’s son and of the Ruler’s daughter, instructed
+all mankind to call their Father.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HOUSE TO LET ***
+
+***** This file should be named 2324-0.txt or 2324-0.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+    https://www.gutenberg.org/2/3/2/2324/
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
+be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
+law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
+so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the
+United States without permission and without paying copyright
+royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
+of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
+and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
+the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
+of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
+copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
+easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
+of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
+Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may
+do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
+by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
+license, especially commercial redistribution.
+
+START: FULL LICENSE
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
+Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
+Project Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
+www.gutenberg.org/license.
+
+Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+
+1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
+destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your
+possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
+Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
+by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the
+person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph
+1.E.8.
+
+1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
+paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this
+agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
+Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
+of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual
+works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
+States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
+United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
+claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
+displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
+all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
+that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting
+free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm
+works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
+Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily
+comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
+same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when
+you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
+in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
+check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
+agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
+distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
+other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no
+representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
+country other than the United States.
+
+1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
+immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear
+prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work
+on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the
+phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed,
+performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
+
+  This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+  most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
+  restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
+  under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
+  eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
+  United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
+  you are located before using this eBook.
+
+1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is
+derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
+contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
+copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
+the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
+redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
+Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
+either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
+obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg-tm
+trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
+additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
+will be linked to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works
+posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
+beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
+any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
+to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format
+other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official
+version posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm website
+(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
+to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
+of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
+Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
+full Project Gutenberg-tm License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+provided that:
+
+* You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+  the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+  you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
+  to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he has
+  agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
+  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
+  within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
+  legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
+  payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
+  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
+  Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
+  Literary Archive Foundation.”
+
+* You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+  you in writing (or by email) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+  does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+  License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
+  copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
+  all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg-tm
+  works.
+
+* You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
+  any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+  electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
+  receipt of the work.
+
+* You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+  distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work or group of works on different terms than
+are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
+from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
+the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
+forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
+Gutenberg-tm collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
+contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
+or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
+other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
+cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
+of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
+with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
+with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
+lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
+or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
+opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
+the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
+without further opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
+OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
+damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
+violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
+agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
+limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
+unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
+remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in
+accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
+production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
+including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
+the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
+or any Project Gutenberg-tm work, (b) alteration, modification, or
+additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any
+Defect you cause.
+
+Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
+computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
+exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
+from people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm’s
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future
+generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
+Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at
+www.gutenberg.org
+
+Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
+U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
+
+The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
+Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
+to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
+and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
+
+Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without
+widespread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
+DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular
+state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
+donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm concept of a library of electronic works that could be
+freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
+distributed Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of
+volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
+the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
+necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
+edition.
+
+Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
+facility: www.gutenberg.org
+
+This website includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.